A Good Enough Mother

A heart-stopping mother's story of love and loss, and a riveting drama that lets us inside the secret world of therapist and patient

Ruth Hartland is the director of a trauma unit, a psychotherapist with years of experience, wise and respected by her peers. But professional skill is no guard against private grief. The mother of grown twins, she is haunted by the fact that her beautiful, difficult, fragile son Tom, a boy who never "fit in," disappeared a year and a half earlier. She cannot give up hope of finding him, but feels she is living a kind of half-life, waiting for him to return.

Enter a new patient, Dan--unstable and traumatized--who looks exactly like her missing son. She is determined to help him, but soon, her own complicated feelings, about the dissolution of her marriage and her family, about how she has failed her own boy, cloud her professional judgement. Boundaries she would never have crossed with another patient are crossed. And before long, events spiral out of control....

An utterly compelling pageturner with a timebomb at its core, A Good Enough Mother is a brilliant, beautiful story of mothering, and how to let go of the ones we love when we must.

Bev Thomas was a clinical psychologist in the NHS for many years. She currently works as an organizational consultant in mental health and other services. She lives in London with her family.