SOMEBODY ELSE’S DAUGHTER:
A Novel
By Elizabeth Brundage
Viking
Publication Date: July 2008
Contact: Grace McQuade, 212/446-5101

Elizabeth Brundage became a favorite amongst readers and book groups in 2005 with her literary thriller, The Doctor’s Wife. In her second novel, SOMEBODY ELSE’S DAUGHTER, she delivers a psychological thriller packed with secrets and dark motives surrounding a private adoption and the consequences that play out years later.

Willa, an adopted teenager brought up in elegant prosperity, is now a student at the prestigious Pioneer School in Western Massachusetts. But her biological father, a failing writer and former drug addict, can’t live with himself without seeing her again so he returns to his roots and the small town where Willa now lives.

In this idyllic Berkshires setting, Willa’s adoptive parents have fled a mysterious past; a feminist sculptor initiates a reckless affair; teenagers live in a world to which adults turn a blind eye; and the headmaster’s wife is busy keeping her husband’s disastrous history and current indiscretions well hidden. The culmination of these forces is the collision of two very different fathers—and a villain whose ends and means slowly unfold with the help, witting and unwitting, of all around him. In SOMEBODY ELSE’S DAUGHTER, Brundage delivers an electric, suspenseful tale of richly conflicted characters and the disturbed landscape of the American psyche.

Elizabeth Brundage holds an MFA in fiction from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where she received a James A. Michener Fellowship. Before attending Iowa, she was a screenwriting fellow at the American Film Institute in Los Angeles. She lives with her family in upstate New York and the Berkshires.