In vitro fertilization is the trigger for a young woman whose identity crisis and misguided fantasies take her on a mysterious journey to the end of the world

Katherine Carlye is an IVF baby. Stored as a frozen embryo for eight years, she is then implanted in her mother and given life. By the age of nineteen, Katherine has lost her mother to cancer, and feels her father to be an increasingly distant figure. Instead of going to college, she disappears, telling no one where she has gone. What begins as an attempt to punish her father for his absence gradually becomes a testing ground of his love for her, a coming-to-terms with the death of her mother, and finally the mise-en-sc ne for a courageous leap to true empowerment.

Written in the beautifully spare, lucid, and cinematic prose Thomson is known for, and powered by his natural gift for storytelling, Katherine Carlyle uses the modern techniques of IVF to throw new light on the myth of origins. It is a profound and moving novel about who we are, and how we are loved.