Chloe lives a quiet life. Working as a newspaper archivist and taking care of her Nan who has dementia, she's happy simply to read about the lives of others as she files away the news clippings from the safety of her desk. 

But there's one story that she can't stop thinking about. The case of Angie Kyle - a girl, Chloe's age, who went missing as a child. A girl whose parents never gave up hope.

When Chloe's Nan gets moved into a nursing home, leaving Chloe on the brink of homelessness, she takes a desperate step: answering an ad to be a lodger in the missing girl's family home. It could be the perfect opportunity to get closer to the story she's read so much about.  
 
But with everyone in the house hiding something, the question is – whose secrets are the most dangerous?

This started off as a slow-paced plot due to which it did take some time for me to actually get into the plot. 

But it was filled with manipulation, lies and secrets so once I actually understood what was going, I really enjoyed it. The writing was fantastic and the main highlights were the characterization of Chloe and the twists towards the end. 

The suspense and eeriness is gradually built up and you don’t even realize it since you get totally engrossed in the plot. The ending was definitely a surprise because it wasn’t what I was expecting.

Overall, an amazing debut novel. Looking forward to read more by this author.

Thank You to NetGalley and Pan Macmillan for this ARC!

This is a slow burn of a book that raises moral questions; the secrets and lies that lurk beneath the facade that the family of the missing Angie present to the world made me wonder what lengths I would go to in order to hold my fractured family together.  The book also has real emotional resonance. The heartbreaking scenes with Chloe's Nan suffering from dementia were incredibly powerful, and Maureen's fragile hold on her sanity following the disappearance of her daughter was at times hard to read. There is a sense of tension that builds through the book as Chloe becomes more obsessed with finding out what happened to the missing Angie. Some of the scenes once she moves in with the Kyles are almost painful to read as the tension is so palpable and the setting so claustrophobic. 

Chloe herself is something of an enigma; she leaves only a light imprint of herself behind, blending into the background and keeping her head down. At other times she behaves almost recklessly and desires to be seen and credited for solving the case of missing Angie. I really couldn't get a handle on her character at all. By the end of the novel, I really appreciated the author's skill at creating her character, as all the parts in the novel clicked together in an incredibly satisfying way. 

I would like to thank the publishers and Net Galley for the advance copy in return for an honest review.

Absolutely loved this! It had me hooked right from the start and I loved the characters. Didn't have loads of twists and turns which I quite liked about it, just a good strong storyline that kept me thoroughly engaged right up to the last page. 

Highly recommended and well deserves 5 stars. 

Thank you Pan MacMillan and Netgalley,

This was a great read, enjoyed it thoroughly, was hooked from the first page, loads of twists and turns, would recommend it x

A decent attempt at a first novel, I loved the premise and whilst the book was well written I just wish it was creepier as the ending was just sad rather than sinister and the book offered a lot a as a dark thriller. Would recommend if you need something different to read as it’s original and fresh.
Thank you to NetGalley and Mantle for the advanced copy to review.

A fascinating thriller describing the tale of a lonely young woman trying to insinuate her way into a family that lost a child years before. Intriguing and insightful!

Wow. Wow. Wow. Where do I start with this. I absolutely loved everything about this book and I’m sorry that I didn’t read it sooner! The story is compelling, clever and well-paced and a real ‘just one more chapter’ pull! I will definitely be recommending this to friends and fellow readers and thank you to NetGalley and Mantle Books for allowing me to review this. Can’t wait to read more from Anna x

An intriguing gripping book about a lonely girl who after her Nan is sent to a home, starts to become obsessed with a couple who had lost their child many years ago.....it is a bit long but keep reading! It gets good!!!

This book felt long and like it didn’t really get going until about halfway through. The description drew me in and there were parts that my heart felt like it might stop- when it did tension it did it right! Without any spoilers the last 10% I didn’t take a breath and there’s a few twists I didn’t expect. Because of the length I’ve given the book 3/5 (would probably give 3.5 if halves were possible) because part of it felt like a slog but it was okay.

This is one of those books you just KNOW is going to be a bestseller. 

The narrative follows the MC Chloe who we find being the only fully time carer for her Nan. With her mother passed away and he Gran having advanced dementia Chloe finds herself living vicariously through old newspaper articles. 

I was really surprised by this book, I thought I'd figured it out. I was absolutely sure at around 70% that I'd called the twist. I hadn't. I hadn't called the one after that either. I most certainly hadn't come close to guessing that ending!

Had never read anything by this author before, but I'll definitely be following from now on.

The debut novel from Anna Wharton, The Imposter tells the story of Chloe, who's struggling to juggle her job as a newspaper archivist with caring for her nan who has dementia. But when her nan is finally put into a care home, Chloe finds herself becoming obsessed with the case of a missing girl many years before. 

The Imposter is a touching story of loneliness and grief. Although it takes a little while for the story to get going, it soon picks up the pace and becomes a compelling read. With a great twist at the end, this is a strong debut from Wharton and I look forward to read her future books.

This book left me feeling very uncomfortable - a lonely woman is struggling to cope as her gran is put in a home as she suffers from dementia. Chloe is in danger of losing the house where they both lived and at the same time becomes obsessed with a missing person's case in her job as a newspaper archivist. She finds out where the girl lived and manages to become a lodger there.

This is a book about lonleiness and being lonely. I felt sad at the start of the book as it's very upsetting reading about her nan and Chloe but then the story doesn't move forward for quite a while so it loses its appeal.

I found Chloe to be a strange character. A bit too whimiscal in one way and just careless in another. I didn't understand her and she definately didn't understand herself.
The themes of loss - the missing child and dementia - are woven throughout the novel but it just wasn't for me

Anna Wharton has exploded into the literary world with this emotional thriller which will leave you raw in so many ways. 
I think what initially got my interest was that Chloe was deliberately avoiding all contact with the social worker who was trying to get her nana moved into a nursing home due to her increasing symptoms of Alzheimer’s as it was apparent that Chloe could no longer care for her at home and hold down a full time job. 
Chloe was an archivist at the local paper and loved her work and she had stumbled upon an article on a missing child from 25 years ago which took her interest to the point of obsession. She dug out all the related articles until she had a whole file of information that had accumulated over the intervening years. 
Despite her best attempts she lost her job and her nana was placed into a local nursing home. 
Chloe decided to investigate the case of the missing child and tracked down the parents Phil and Maureen who had recently sold their original home and moved to the middle of nowhere. 
The story goes on from there and will keep you enthralled right up to the biggest twist at the end. I’m not sure how I feel after reading this book but I do know that parts of it will stay with me for a very long time. 
Brilliant debut.

This is an interesting idea, with a good twist near the end of the book. I did find it a slow read, which requires patience. I nearly gave up in the middle, but did find it an interesting psychological study of an isolated personality.

Chloe spends her days working in the archive of a Peterborough newspaper, 'peacefully among other people's stories', and her nights caring for Nan, stricken with dementia. 
Chloe becomes obsessed with a historic case of a disappearance: a little girl, the same age as Chloe would have been, who went missing from a play area that's handily, in the present day, right next to Nan's care facility.
As Chloe digs deeper into the case, she grows convinced that something untoward happened on that fateful day... and vows to find out. But what secrets is Chloe trying to hide?
It's slightly difficult to review this without giving away/spoiling too much of the plot. The Imposter is full of little nuances, cleverly done. Take Chloe herself: she's longing for a mother-daughter relationship following the passing of her own mum, and zeros in on the missing girl's still-grieving mother to satisfy that. It verges on the unhealthy, and there is absolutely the touch of the predator in Chloe .
It's also an interesting decision to set the novel in the recent past, and I can't quite put my finger on why, apart from Chloe's job as a newspaper archivist, involving laboriously cutting out clippings and scanning them, a practice which went out of the window in local newspapers some time ago (I worked in a local newsroom for 15 years).
I found it a little hard to swallow when the disappearance was casually brought up in conversation by Chloe with her best friend, who claimed to remember it on the news - remember, they were both four-years-old at the time too. That is a small thing though - because Chloe's descent into full-blown obsession is a fascinating character study, on the power of love (or lack of it). It's also a tricky thing to pull off - liking a protagonist who constantly goes too far, and crosses too many boundaries, but author Anna Wharton manages it in spades.

I struggled with this book. It is a very slow read, only bucking up toward the end and I wasn't sure it was worth persevering with on the whole.

Chloe lives with her nan who has dementia. She works in the archive section of a newspaper and loves her job. When her nan goes missing for a few hours, social work takes over and puts her into a home  (I'm not sure how realistic this is) leaving Chloe bereft and soon to be homeless as the house has to be sold to pay for the care home.  At the same time Chloe loses her job, not surprising really as she seems to just suit herself as to when she goes into work. She becomes obsessed with cuttings about a couple who lost their daughter 25 years ago and wants to solve the mystery of what happened. She goes to see them in their new home out on the fens and finds they want to take in a lodger. You can guess what happens next. 

I think there is a good book in here somewhere. The theme of loneliness is all encompassing throughout as is Chloe's longing for a family. Unfortunately, Chloe is not at all a sympathetic character and eventually comes across as sinister. As mentioned earlier, it is a slow read especially at the beginning. There is no real hook to get you going and the endless ruminations on the missing girl combined with interactions with her nan which focus on her dementia and are very repetitive make you wonder why you're reading it. At heart I think the structure is to blame and perhaps it would have been better to start at a more exciting part of the narrative and flashback to earlier slower parts. I also feel more could have been made of the relationship between Chloe and her friend Hollie as this is important in terms of character development. 

Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for the ARC.

I wasn't sure what to expect with this advance offering. Newspaper archivist Chloe, single and in her late 20s,  leads an underwhelmingly lonely life. Mum has died and she lives with her nan who has dementia. Her best friend is loved up and living in the perfect house with the dreamy man. While Chloe's life is unravelling, nan's social worker wants nan in a home and her boss is one of those gits who is entirely unsupportive about her nan-related absences. Little wonder then that Chloe is taken with the story of a neighbouring four-year-old girl who disappeared. The girl, who would be the same age as her today, pops up repeatedly in the papers Chloe digitises in the newspaper archives.  
Jobless, about to be homeless and practically friendless Chloe tracks down the girl's parents in a local village ... and becomes their lodger. The slow build up of her relationship with the parents left me with my heart in my mouth at times. 
This is a painfully tender portrayal of a woman who doesn't fit in and yet your heart breaks for her as she attempts to do so.  
This tender evocative story about secrets and loss is a brilliant debut novel. I suspect this will be 2021's Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine. The ending is unexpected...I'll leave it at that!  
I loved it, bravo Anna Wharton - looking forward to your next offering.

Chloe hasn’t had an easy life. As a child growing up in care she has had her fair share of being pulled from one place to another, never really knowing where home was. At least now she lives with her Nan, but she is struggling with the constant demands of Nan’s dementia. Sometimes she is torn between being at home for Nan and going to work. We meet her as they take a visit to the graveyard to leave flowers for Chloe’s mother. Chloe has to leave Nan by the grave to clean out the container for flowers. She is only gone a few moments, but when she gets back Nan is nowhere to be seen. Chloe frantically searches the cemetery, the copse behind the graves but she knows in the pit of her stomach this is it. If she calls the police because she has lost Nan they will alert social services. Nan’s social worker is pleased that Chloe wants to look after her Nan, but feels that the job is proving too much for someone working full time. She has been pushing for Nan to move into a home and Nan’s disappearance has made the argument for this even more compelling. While working she finds the story of a young girl who went missing from a playground and becomes fascinated with the case. Angela Kyle was at the park and disappeared while her father was distracted. Now she would be the same age as Chloe. As Nan is found and social services intervene, Chloe finds that the home they have recently shared will be sold for care fees. She then loses her job for taking the Kyle archive off the premises. Feeling totally adrift, Chloe wonders if she could be of help to the Kyle family. Maybe with her research she could help them find Angie. 

Chloe work in the archives seems to take place at a similar time to when I was working for my local newspaper. A time when old-fashioned jobs like those who worked the printing press were being made redundant. I remember the warm, print smell in the afternoons and the smell of our archive, complete with a severe looking librarian who spent all day painstakingly cutting out and filing stories, and lending them out begrudgingly, as if she was lending her children! I remember our printing press being shut down. I remember the archive becoming digital. I used to sell advertising space then sit and design the advert on A4 requests with invoice slips attached. A man would collect them once a day and physically drive them to our art department who would magically turn them into adverts that appeared in features. Then it all became digital. I guess this gave me a way into the story, and a sense of what Chloe did and how it feels when your job is defunct. However, for Chloe it’s her whole purpose gone at once since she’s no longer her Nan’s carer. She visits the home, but Nan is only there sometimes and often protests she doesn’t have a granddaughter. I could feel Chloe’s sense of being adrift, without anything to anchor her. 

She visits the fenland village where Maureen and Patrick Kyle now live. It is in the middle of nowhere, and their house is even outside the tiny hamlet set down a long drive. I live in Lincolnshire and can appreciate the endless flat fields and open sky, being able to see for miles and at night a huge expense of stars. By coincidence she sees an ad in the village shop for a lodger in the Kyle’s home. What better way to get to know the Kyles and try to solve the mystery? She can also solve the problem of losing her home. So she moves in with Maureen and Patrick and starts to get to know them, being honest about her past in care and her Nan, but not letting on that she knows about their daughter. She pretends to work in insurance and takes the bus every day into town, sometimes visiting Nan and other times visiting the playground where Angie went missing. However, lies are often found out and Chloe hasn’t fully thought through the implications of finding out the truth.

It was very hard to get to know Chloe and find out who she truly was, despite being party to her thoughts and feelings. I wondered if she was suffering borderline personality disorder, often categorised as a lack of cohesive self. She certainly fits the pattern and came from the type of disordered background that can lead to this type of mental illness. She was certainly exhibiting impulsive behaviour that she hadn’t fully thought through and formed intense but unstable relationships with others. Her friend Hollie, who had also gone through the care system, seemed like the only constant in her life. Although at times even she struggled to understand Chloe’s motivations and behaviour. I felt that the author treated Chloe’s behaviour sensitively and honestly. As Maureen started to behave in a motherly way towards Chloe, she responded like a daughter, possibly because this was the type of maternal affection that had always been missing from her life. This meant that she humoured the use of a special ‘Bunnikins’ plate and small cutlery for her at teatimes, where maybe someone else might have asked for something different. The pair bond very quickly, but she doesn’t cultivate the same bond with Patrick who seems to ask a lot of questions or Maureen’s friend Josie who seems suspicious of her presence. Chloe listens out for clues and finds Patrick slightly overbearing with his wife. They do have rows which she tries to listen to, but they also have a padlocked room that has no explanation. 

The tension ratchets up slowly, starting as Patrick asks questions about where she works and Chloe getting a glimpse of what is hidden in the locked room. As she edges closer to the truth, she is in danger of being expelled from her new home or if someone in the house is responsible for Angie’s disappearance, could she be in serious danger? The need to know what had happened all those years before became addictive and I read the last chapters quickly and greedily! I was also fascinated by the dynamic building between Chloe and Maureen, who starts to suspect that Chloe might be her daughter. All the love and longing this mother has had for her missing girl starts to be lavished on Chloe and what’s so sad is that this is exactly what she has needed her whole life. There’s a point where the scales start tipping and I wondered if Chloe was starting to believe there could be some truth in it. She doesn’t remember her earliest years, so could she be Angie? Patrick goes along with this fiction, he doesn’t want to see his wife grieving another ‘daughter’ but he is uncomfortable and I started to wonder if he knew more than he was letting on. The ending when it comes is not sensational, but is sad, human and utterly tragic. However, there is another revelation coming that blew my mind a little. It was a bit like seeing The Sixth Sense then wanting to watch it again immediately with your new found knowledge. I thought the title was very apt, because Chloe is an imposter. She has no idea who she is, so becomes what other people need her to be. I truly hoped for a happier future for the character and her sense of isolation touched me. This was a great read, both as a mystery, but also has an exploration of what happens when we have no roots or anchor in life.

The Imposter follows the life of Chloe after she begins renting a room with a family who have suffered a terrible loss. Investigating the people she lives with, what could go wrong?

Reading this story was definitely a rollercoaster. At times the storyline felt fairly obvious, however there were many sharp twists and turns to really throw the reader off.

I enjoyed the characters but I felt at the beginning I couldn’t understand Chloe’s decisions and found it hard to relate to her. It felt unrealistic the weird, obsessive attachment she had over Angie’s case to be confusing but I think it essentially boiled down to her past and who she was as a person. The final twist at the end was something I definitely didn’t see coming and thought it was quite intriguing.

Overall, slow at the start but nevertheless a great read and interesting storyline development.

Many thanks to NetGalley for providing me with a copy of the book in exchange for an honest review.

I enjoyed this story.  I got a little bit frustrated at times by the lead character and wanted to shout at her.  I do find it annoying at times when characters in a story believe that they are better at investigating cases than the actual police!   However, I enjoyed the story and it was certainly unusual, with an interesting twist.   Worth a read.