Contemporary Authors

• Only Daughter - 2016 MIRA, New York, NY

• Canberra Times - http://www.canberratimes.com.au/act-news/canberra-life/only-daughter-anna-snoekstras-debut-novel-set-in-canberra-is-bound-for-hollywood-20160810-gqp96f.html

  Quoted in Sidelights: "I was just lucky that what I was interested in was what a lot of people were interested in. But I mean, it's in that genre, domestic noir, it's something that keeps coming back, so even if this thing hadn't happened now, maybe it would have."

  AUGUST 19 2016
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  Only Daughter, Anna Snoekstra's debut novel set in Canberra, is bound for Hollywood

  Sally Pryor
  It all started with the sound of glass breaking in the dead of night.

  Someone had smashed Anna Snoekstra's car windows outside her Melbourne home, and she couldn't get back to sleep. Paranoid thoughts began crowding her mind; it didn't help that she'd been thinking a lot about film noir, imposter stories and the creeping fear of the unknown. On this night, as a way of calming herself down, she started mapping out a story in her head, on involving a missing girl, and a woman who returns, years later, claiming to be her.

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  http://www.canberratimes.com.au/act-news/canberra-life/only-daughter-anna-snoekstras-debut-novel-set-in-canberra-is-bound-for-hollywood-20160810-gqp96f.html
  Anna Snoekstra, whose debut novel Only Daughter, a thriller set in Canberra, has been picked up in the US by Universal ...
  Anna Snoekstra, whose debut novel Only Daughter, a thriller set in Canberra, has been picked up in the US by Universal pictures. Photo: Elesa Kurtz
  As it happened, no one was after Snoekstra – she had simply left her wallet in the car and someone had broken the window to steal it. But the germ of a genuine pot-boiler was already fermenting.

  Three years down the track, her highly-anticipated debut novel is about to be released, and Hollywood is already knocking.

  Entitled Only Daughter, the book fits squarely in what's been dubbed the Gone Girl genre, in that, like the 2012 novel by Gillian Flynn, it involves a female protagonist who is, ostensibly, in danger. It's also part of the Girl on the Train juggernaut – the 2015 novel which rides on the back of Gone Girl. But what distinguishes this book from those two bestsellers – and the 30 or so titles that are riding on their coattails - is the fact that Only Daughter is set in Canberra.

  Canberra is, says Snoekstra, the perfect setting for a troubled teenaged protagonist, living through one of the city's hottest summers, and permeated with a sense of looming danger, both real – the 2003 bushfires – and unnamed, and therefore creepy. The daughter of the title, Rebecca Winter, goes missing, and 11 years later, a young woman, as a way of getting out of being arrested for shoplifting, claims to be her.

  "I grew up here, so it felt really natural to be talking about someone's childhood and being a teenager," says Snoekstra, over lunch in Manuka. She spent her childhood in Canberra's south, and finished her schooling at Narrabundah College, before moving to Melbourne to study creative writing and cinema. But, while her family have also moved away, she returns here regularly, and it has always struck her as a great setting for a psychological thriller.

  "It just felt like a natural place to talk about being a teenager for one, and also a really safe place where bad things don't happen," she says.

  "That's how it was in my head, and also very suburban. And the other side of it is that really stark architecture, this is where all the politics happens."

  Backtrack to three years ago, and Snoekstra was working nights in a Melbourne cinema when she first struck on the idea of a novel.

  "I thought about the idea for a long, long time before I actually wrote anything - months and months, just because I was working in the cinema," she says.

  "I felt like I should probably get a proper job, or a more regular job, and I knew committing myself to writing a novel was going to be a big thing to do, so I was going back and forth, because I really loved the idea, and I just wasn't sure if that's what I should be putting my time into at that time in my life."

  She had long been fascinated by the legend of Bluebeard – the ancient folk about a man whose wives disappear mysteriously, one by one. She loved imposter stories – The Changeling, and Anastasia – and psychological thrillers like Hitchcock's Rebecca, and George Cuckor's Gaslight. It's no wonder the car windows smashing in the dead of night had her spooked.

  "I was interested in the idea of taking someone's life, and two stories set in the same place but from two different perspectives," she says.

  But not once did the thought of publishing or marketing tropes enter her mind. Gone Girl had only recently been published when she began writing and besides, it's a genre that has been around for centuries. She even wrote a Master's thesis focusing on the Bluebeard genre – "one of the oldest myths in storytelling".

  So the fact that she's being primed to join a current runaway publishing phenomenon is confusing, if not a little galling.

  "I've read all of them, those kind of books. It's good, but it's also a little annoying because that kind of genre has been around for such a long time," she says.

  "Gone Girl was such a big hit, which is great - that kind of brought it to light, then everything's 'the next Gone Girl', to the point where every female-based crime book is called 'girl' something. If you look in the bookshops, there are about 30 of them, and it seems a bit crazy that they're just using that name and trying to make it into some phenomenon of girl books."

  Not that she's complaining. She spent about a year writing the book, and began shopping it around in Australia. Not one agent was interested, so she went to the US. There, an agent picked it up straight away, and before long, she had a publisher. And then another and another: the book is now coming out in 19 countries, although interestingly, Australia didn't pick it up until at least 10 other countries had got in first.

  In the years since finishing Only Daughter – whose original title was The New Winter - she's already sold her next two novels to Harper Collins – one of which is already finished, and has recently been exchanging emails with the translator of the book's German edition, and the Australian voice artist who is reading the Audiobook version. Not to mention the fact that the film has been optioned by Universal Pictures – she has a vivid recollection of taking the call from a hyper-excited film agent while still in her pyjamas at 7.00am - and the screenplay is being written by the same person who did The Girl on the Train. Debut novelists don't get huge advances for their work, but selling the film option meant Snoekstra could quit her job at the cinema for a bit and focus on writing.

  So far, so surreal for a young writer with no profile and no knowledge of the publishing industry. Although, sitting in Manuka on a wintry day, just around the corner from the McDonalds branch where part of the book is set, she says things feel surprisingly normal for the moment.

  "I think that's because it's been my reality for two years now. The movie stuff came up in probably a bit over a year ago," she says. But, amid all the excitement about movies and scripts and speculation as to who might play the film's lead (Emma Stone, a redhead like the book's protagonist, comes irresistibly to mind), the book itself has yet to hit the shops. There have been positive advance reviews on some literary websites, but as for what's coming, she has no idea what to expect. She's no wiser, really, than when she first started out, although she's clear-minded about the luck of timing involved.

  "I had no platform, I had nothing really going for me. The only way I was going to really be able to do what I actually wanted to do was just to think of a really good idea and write something really, really well, and that's the only way I could actually get people to take notice of me," she says.

  "I was just lucky that what I was interested in was what a lot of people were interested in. But I mean, it's in that genre, domestic noir, it's something that keeps coming back, so even if this thing hadn't happened now, maybe it would have."

  And what of her beloved hometown – much changed since her teens? Amusingly, the international response to the Canberra depicted in the novel has focused on how damn exotic we all sound here.

  "I was trying to get across in the book that whole thing about the city and the bush being pressed up against each other a little bit, which is something I think is so beautiful about Canberra and so unique," she says.

  It helps that she has used the 2003 bushfires as a vivid and atmospheric backdrop to the story, although there is a certain amount of personal pain underlying the narrative.

  "I was a teenager when that happened here, and I just remember it so vividly, and when I was writing those chapters was in one of Melbourne's hottest summers, 2013-14," she says.

  "I was in Melbourne [on Black Saturday] and also my grandparents died in the Ash Wednesday fires. So bushfires in my family has always been a real soft spot, a real fear, I think."

  And while the story itself is not based on any real events, she made the second character – the lookalike imposter who remains unnamed throughout – 25, the same age as she was when she was writing.

  "She changed ages a few times in it, but I thought that it was something that doesn't really get written about very often, that time where you realise that you're an adult and that things actually matter and you don't always know what you're meant to be doing," she says.

  It's safe to say that Snoekstra, now at the still-tender age of 28, knows exactly what she's meant to be doing, even if it means carrying the burden of a much-hyped genre on her shoulders, at least for now.

  Only Daughter, by Anna Snoekstra, is published by Harlequin, and is released September 15.

  The book will be launched on August 27 at the National Museum of Australia at 10.00am as part of the Canberra Writers Festival. Visit canberrawritersfestival.com.au for more information.

• Deadline - http://deadline.com/2015/06/the-new-winter-movie-anna-snoekstra-universal-pictures-working-title-1201440222/

  Universal Options Upcoming Novel ‘The New Winter’ For Working Title

  by Patrick Hipes
  June 9, 2015 2:00pm

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  BREAKING NEWS
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  ANNA SNOEKSTRA
  THE NEW WINTER
  Universal
  Universal Pictures has optioned The New Winter, the upcoming debut novel by Aussie writer Anna Snoekstra. The pic project will be produced by Eric Fellner and Tim Bevan of Working Title, and marks the first official deal for the studio and the UK outfit since re-upping their first-look deal last week to 2020.

  RelatedWorking Title Re-Ups With Universal, New Agreement To Run Through 2020
  The book, to be published by Harlequin imprint Mira in 2016, centers on a runaway woman trying to escape her past who pretends to be a girl abducted from a small town 10 years before. The girl’s family takes her in until she slowly starts to uncover the mysterious circumstances and family secrets that actually lead to their daughter’s disappearance.

  working titleLiza Chasin will executive produce. Newly minted EVP Production Erik Baiers, who has worked closely with Working Title on titles including Les Miserables, and creative executive Chloe Yellin will oversee for the studio.

  This adds to Working Title’s strong Universal pipeline that produced last year’s Best Picture Oscar nominee The Theory Of Everything which won Best Actor for Eddie Redmayne. Movies in the works include the Coen brothers’ Hail, Caesar, 3D action adventure Everest and the Redmayne-starring The Danish Girl via Universal’s Focus Features.

  Snoekstra is repped by CAA and Trident Media Group.

  Subscribe to Deadline Breaking News Alerts and keep your inbox happy

• Saturday Paper - https://www.thesaturdaypaper.com.au/2016/09/10/the-rise-only-daughter-author-anna-snoekstra/14734296003710

  Quoted in Sidelights: “The missing or murdered person never has a voice and I wanted her to,” says Anna. “I was interested in taking on the other voice to see how it would work.”

  The rise of ‘Only Daughter’ author Anna Snoekstra

  Working night shift at a Melbourne cinema, Anna Snoekstra dared to dream. Now, her debut novel has caught the attention of Hollywood. By Jan McGuinness.

  If Anna Snoekstra had not returned late, tired and distracted to her inner-Melbourne share house after the night shift selling tickets and cleaning loos at Melbourne’s Kino Cinemas, would she have ignited the train of life-altering events that transformed her into that rarest of creatures, a full-time novelist?

  Would she be the author three years later of a debut novel to be distributed in more than 19 countries and adapted for the screen by Universal Pictures from a script finalised recently by Erin Cressida Wilson, whose credits include The Girl on the Train and Secretary?

  It is a question that feeds into the paranoia surrounding the novel’s improbable gestation, but all Anna knows is that after that sleepless night high on adrenalin she had a fully formed story by morning and a pile of frenziedly written notes.

  “I was so exhausted I hadn’t noticed when I pulled up outside the house that my wallet had slipped onto the passenger seat,” she says.

  “Ten minutes later I was in bed and heard a loud crash. The wallet, of course, was gone, and I lay awake all night feeling shaken and paranoid.”

  “MOST OF ALL I ASPIRED TO WRITE SOMETHING THAT WOULD CRAWL UNDER YOUR SKIN AND STAY THERE.”
  With a head full of recently viewed films such as The Changeling about a boy who pretended to be a missing son and Anastasia about a woman who impersonated a member of the last Russian royal family, the creative- and scriptwriting graduate’s imagination went into overdrive. What emerged was The New Winter (changed to Only Daughter by the publisher MIRA, an imprint of Harlequin Enterprises), the story of a runaway woman trying to escape her past by pretending to be Bec Winter, a girl she physically resembles who was abducted from a small town 11 years previously. Accepted by Bec’s all-too-eager family, she gradually discovers the mysterious circumstances and family secrets woven into her disappearance.

  The story is structured as two narratives from the point of view of each woman and goes back and forth so that they feed into each other, giving the reader clues from one character that the other is unaware of.

  “The missing or murdered person never has a voice and I wanted her to,” says Anna. “I was interested in taking on the other voice to see how it would work.”

  The fear-fuelled paranoia Anna felt on the night she drafted her story surrounds lost Bec’s disappearance and is mirrored by what is happening in the wider world of the novel. When Bec goes missing John Howard is prime minister and warnings to “be alert, not alarmed” niggle the public consciousness. Eleven years later Tony Abbott’s government is in power, and public fear has escalated. At its heart the novel is an allegory of our political climate and an investigation of how paranoia is fed and exploited.

  Suspense, women doubting themselves, and home becoming a dark and threatening place are subjects that also fascinate the 28-year-old, whose master’s degree in 1940s Gaslight cinema is on hold. Unsurprisingly, Anna’s favourite film is Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca, and Rebecca Winter an obvious homage.

  “I wanted also to write something I’d love to read, about female characters that are relatable even when they behave badly. Most of all I aspired to write something that would crawl under your skin and stay there.”

  Being an Australian writer is important to Anna, who grew up in suburban Canberra. Her characters shoplift at Myer, squirt vinegar on hot chips at the local pool and wake up to warbling magpies. But after several drafts and rewrites it was American, not Australian agents who responded to the manuscript she began circulating in September–October 2014.

  “There was little if any local response, but American agents were interested straight away,” says Anna, who had already spent a month on the internet researching literary agents and how to approach them.

  “I was prepared for a long battle, but within two weeks I had 10 expressions of interest and three firm offers from people wanting to represent me. After signing with Trident Media Group in New York, who I thought understood best what I was after, I got more offers.”

  Anna and her new agent did some edits together before the manuscript was circulated among publishers and film agents; three months later book deals started coming in. No sooner had Anna decided to sign with MIRA than a film agent read the manuscript overnight and set up a call.

  “I didn’t expect it to go anywhere. But there I was still in my PJs at 7am and he’s on the phone from Los Angeles reeling off the names of film people who were already interested. They all read it very quickly, and because my roots are in film I was very excited by the names.”

  Spoiled for choice once more, Only Daughter was finally optioned by Universal Studios to be produced by Working Title Films, the London-based production company responsible for countless hits including The Theory of Everything and Four Weddings and a Funeral.

  A year ago, and despite the entrée into Hollywood, Anna was still cleaning the Kino’s frequently flooded women’s bathroom (patrons leave the taps on), staring wistfully at the Universal logo on the screen wondering whether she would ever see her own film up there and feeling at times as if she had made the whole thing up.

  Since then she has been to the United States twice and, with her novel just published, has given up the Kino on the strength of her film option and publishing advances for Only Daughter and her recently accepted second novel, Dolls.

  Picking her battles
  On the first trip late last year, Anna visited all the studios where executives had read her novel and were interested to discuss other projects she had in hand, including film scripts and her second novel, which started out as a film script.

  It was, she says, an exercise in learning how to compromise, pick her battles and when to give in or be firm. Already Only Daughter has been relocated from small town Australia to Arizona. That was a compromise. But she dug her heels in and won when the Hollywood machine insisted on more of a love story. In the novel, pretend Bec has a passing affair and lost Bec has a crush on a co-worker. But friendship is the book’s central relationship, says Anna, and that is very important to her.

  Not a bad result for someone who took on the white linen-suited head of Universal Studios single-handedly.

  “I think I got away with a lot because of my naivety and because of being an Aussie and a novelty. They loved it. And they were not expecting me to have written that book and thought I would be someone a lot darker. They all said I was not at all what they were expecting and, ‘How old are you?’

  “But I had to learn not to self-deprecate, they don’t like it and they don’t get it because everyone in Hollywood talks themselves up. And they hardly ever tell you anything negative. If you don’t get a response to something, it means they hate it. I call it the Hollywood silence – they are very nice but you never hear from them again.”

  In New York, Anna met Erin Cressida Wilson and found her to be engaging and respectful of her themes and ideas suggesting issues of paranoia around 9/11 to play with in the new American setting. However, Anna is yet to see the final script and suspects she is getting the Hollywood silence on that one.

  Meanwhile, she picked up a scriptwriting project for a producer she met in Los Angeles at the American Film Institute. But the highlight of this trip was marrying Ryan Lamb, the bass player in Melbourne indie pop group Alpine. The couple had been together about eight years, and the parents were planning a traditional wedding, which Anna says was starting to make her feel super stressed.

  “Ryan came over for two weeks, and we thought it would be romantic to elope instead to Nashville,” she says. “So we combined the wedding and honeymoon and had a big party when we got home.’’

  Anna returned to America in May this year to attend the Chicago Book Expo and to do advance publicity for Only Daughter in New York. Publishers Weekly, an American publishing trade news weekly targeted at publishers, librarians and booksellers, listed the novel as a 2016 buzz book, which also gave it a huge boost.

  Now back in Melbourne and living in another share house in Thornbury which, unlike her previous abode at least has heating, a backyard, vegie patch and stable kitchen floor, Anna is writing full-time, although barely subsisting, she is quick to point out, on what amounts to the minimum wage. And she has no problem with motivation because despite holding four degrees she has had so much trouble finding employment that she believes it is this or nothing.

  “I’m off to a roaring start and I don’t want to waste it. Besides, I love it. A few times before this happened I thought I should concentrate on getting a real job, but I can’t give this up, it makes me really happy.”

  That she writes at all is another kind of marvel. Anna says she suffered from so many ear infections as a young child that she couldn’t hear and didn’t speak.

  “So I had to have special classes because I couldn’t read or write either,” she says. “My sister spoke for me. But two terrific teachers turned it around when I was in year two or three. It was bizarre, but all thanks to those teachers. So when I started writing kids’ stories they were so excited and encouraging that I felt really good about it. They always told me I should be a writer and gave me so much positive reinforcement.”

  Now she not only writes but reads everything, loves crime fiction and before her Only Daughter breakthrough won a Sisters in Crime’s Scarlet Stiletto Award for her story “Out Came the Sun”. Favourite reads include Stephen King, women writers, the classics and young adult fiction, but mostly books that are smart and have a lot more going on beneath the surface level.

  She would like to write a true crime novel along the lines of Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood. But for now her fondest wish is that Only Daughter will deprive its readers of sleep as grippingly as it did her in the making of it.

  This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on Sep 10, 2016 as "Cleaning up". Subscribe here.

• Anna Snoekstra Home Page - http://www.annasnoekstra.com/

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Anna Snoekstra was born in Canberra, Australia to two civil servants. At the age of seventeen she decided to avoid a full time job and a steady wage to move to Melbourne and become a writer. She studied Creative Writing and Cinema at The University of Melbourne, followed by Screenwriting at RMIT University.

  After finishing university, Anna wrote for independent films and fringe theatre, and directed music videos. During this time, she worked as a cheesemonger, a waitress, a barista, a nanny, a receptionist, a cinema attendant and a film reviewer.

  Anna now lives with her husband, cat and two housemates and works full time writing. You can pre-order her debut novel Only Daughter here.

• Guardian - https://www.theguardian.com/books/australia-books-blog/2016/sep/07/from-bluebeard-to-gone-girl-why-im-proud-to-be-part-of-the-domestic-noir-comeback

  Quoted in Sidelights: yet another alcoholic detective trying to solve that last cold case. I don’t see these other books as my competition – the opposite. I’m proud to be part of this genealogy of writers who are repositioning women in crime narratives. Focusing on them as subjective in the story of their victimisation rather than being the ultimate objectification: a dead body.

  From Bluebeard to Gone Girl: why I'm proud to be part of the 'domestic noir' comeback
  From folktale to modern fiction, the narrative of wives and homemakers becoming pre-emptive detectives in their own victimhood still resonates

  Rosamund Pike and Ben Affleck as Amy and Nick Dunne in the film adaptation of Gone Girl, directed by David Fincher
  Rosamund Pike and Ben Affleck as Amy and Nick Dunne in the film adaptation of Gone Girl, directed by David Fincher Photograph: Allstar/New Regency Pictures
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  Anna Snoekstra
  Wednesday 7 September 2016 02.38 EDT Last modified on Monday 6 February 2017 09.11 EST

  The crime section of my favourite bookstore has changed dramatically. What used to resemble a wall of books about burnt-out, middle aged male detectives now looks very different. Girl on The Train, The Good Girl, The Girl Before, The Perfect Girl and of course Gone Girl. There are countless titles like this, so many it seems farcical.

  Not that I’m laughing. I’m one of them. It may not have the word “girl” in the title (although it was proposed by the publisher) but my novel isn’t so far off.

  If you strip these stories back to their bones, they all follow the same rough chronology: A young woman fears her husband wants to kill her. She begins to search for evidence in their expansive home, which has begun to feel more like a prison. Is she really in danger, or is she paranoid?

  The Girl on the Train: how Paula Hawkins wrote ‘the new Gone Girl’
  Read more
  Long before Lina worried her husband was poisoning her in Alfred Hitchcock’s Suspicion – long before the body of Daphne Du Maurier’s Rebecca washed up on the shore – was a fictional French nobleman’s nameless young wife. When she unlocked the door to the bloody chamber in Charles Perrault’s 1697 folktale Bluebeard, she also unlocked a new genre: the domestic noir.

  I remember when I first heard about domestic noir. It was my second year at university, and I was sitting in the State library reading a breakdown of the genre and its roots in the Bluebeard folktale. I sat back in my chair. Right next to the textbook was a short story I’d been working on. It fit the genre perfectly. I experienced a rush of conflicting emotions that I imagine most young writers experience in some form or other: that I was not original, and that my work was part of something bigger, and more culturally specific, than just my own experience.

  I soon became fascinated with the Bluebeard story, enrolling in a research masters course to further investigate it. What interested me was not so much the folktale itself, but the way the narrative kept resurfacing again and again in fiction. The last time the genre was at its strongest was in the 1940s when the second world war was coming to an end and women’s roles were changing. Men were returning from war, often psychologically as well as physically injured, and women’s freedoms were retracting. Domestic noir gave them an outlet: ordinary wives and homemakers becoming pre-emptive detectives, investigating their own potential victimhood.

  Now, in 2016, the domestic detectives are back with a vengeance. The prominence of the genre is being called a new trend in publishing. A “fad” even. As though it is a brand new creation that will get as tired as ombre hair or the paleo diet.

  Grip-lit? Psychological thrillers were around long before Gone Girl
  Sophie Hannah
  Read more
  Looking back at history, it’s easier to trace why this story appealed to women in certain eras. It is less straightforward in the context of our present moment. To look around ourselves, here and now, and understand why we have seen such a resurgence of Bluebeard-esque narratives. Some ideas do spring to mind: the shocking statistics around intimate partner violence; the culture of fear and paranoia in the current political climate. As Paula Hawkins told the Guardian last year, “Men tend to be attacked by strangers, women tend to be attacked by people they know.”

  In interviews I am often asked what makes my book stand out from the other “girls”. I find this question strange. No one seems to comment on yet another alcoholic detective trying to solve that last cold case. I don’t see these other books as my competition – the opposite. I’m proud to be part of this genealogy of writers who are repositioning women in crime narratives. Focusing on them as subjective in the story of their victimisation rather than being the ultimate objectification: a dead body.

  • Only Daughter by Anna Snoekstra is out now through Harlequin

Only Daughter
Nanette Donohue
Booklist. 113.2 (Sept. 15, 2016): p27.
Quoted in Sidelights: a wickedly twisted and fast-paced plot
readers who enjoy a creepy thriller that will keep them guessing
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/ala/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist_publications/booklist/booklist.cfm
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* Only Daughter. By Anna Snoekstra. Oct. 2016. 278p. MIRA, paper, $15.99 (9780778319443).

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

A disheveled young woman is arrested for stealing food from a supermarket. Just as the police begin to arrest her, she drops a bombshell: she's Rebecca Winter, who went missing 11 years ago on her way home from work. The problem is that our mysterious narrator (the reader never learns her name) isn't Rebecca Winter, just a look-alike who is trying to escape her own life. As she insinuates herself into Rebecca's world, she realizes that the Winter family is hiding dark secrets, and the deeper she gets into her ruse, the more dangerous it becomes. The real Rebecca's story is told in alternate chapters, and we witness her descent from typical teen to paranoid young woman unsure of the people she should trust the most. Unreliable narrator thrillers are practically a subgenre of their own, and there are two unreliable narrators here as well as a wickedly twisted and fast-paced plot that leaves numerous questions unanswered. Readers who need to like their protagonists to enjoy a book might want to steer clear--everyone in the book has nefarious motives--but readers who enjoy a creepy thriller that will keep them guessing will be unable to put this down.--Nanette Donohue

Quoted in Sidelights: highly satisfying
both surprising and believable
excellent debut stands out in the crowded psychological suspense field
Snoekstra, Anna: Only Daughter
Emily Byers
Library Journal. 141.13 (Aug. 1, 2016): p88.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 Library Journals, LLC. A wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
http://www.libraryjournal.com/
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* Snoekstra, Anna. Only Daughter. Mira: Harlequin. Oct. 2016.278p. ISBN 9780778319443. pap. $15.99; ebk. ISBN 9781460395967. F

In suburban Australia, an unnamed narrator is arrested for shoplifting and claims to be a girl named Bee Winter, whose disappearance from the area 11 years ago remains unsolved. Her lie quickly spirals into a new life "reunited" with Bee's family, friends, and the detective in charge of the case. Her elation at escaping her own troubles disappears as she realizes she's interfering with the real investigation and may not be fooling everyone from Bee's past. When the imposter receives threatening text messages, she decides she owes it to the real Bee to find out what happened, even if it means risking her own life. The narrative also alternates with the authentic Bee's past, creating an ominous lead-up to her disappearance. Escalating tension and menace will keep readers glued to the pages, leading to a highly satisfying resolution that is both surprising and believable. VERDICT Snoekstra's excellent debut stands out in the crowded psychological suspense field with smart, subtle red herrings and plenty of dark and violent secrets. Recommend to genre aficionados and readers who enjoyed Lisa Lutz's The Passenger.--Emily Byers, Salem P.L., OR

Quoted in Sidelights: smooth navigation through the twisty plot propels the reader along
preposterous denouement.
Only Daughter
Publishers Weekly. 263.28 (July 11, 2016): p43.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
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Only Daughter

Anna Snoekstra. Mira, $15.99 trade paper (278p) ISBN 978-0-7783-1944-3

In 2003, 16-year-old Rebecca Winter disappeared from a Canberra suburb. In 2014, a disheveled young woman nabbed for stealing food in a Sydney supermarket stuns police by claiming to be Bee, setting in motion Australian author Snoekstra's suspenseful if flawed debut. The mystery protagonist, who's on the run, isn't really Bee, but simply exploiting their uncanny resemblance. The author ratchets up the tension as the split narrative unreels along dual lines: the final week before Bee vanishes and the days after her doppelganger's appearance. If continuing to stymie police investigation on the one hand and avoiding slips with Bee's loved ones on the other weren't tough enough, the imposter increasingly begins to suspect an even higher-stakes risk--falling victim to the same fate as the girl she's impersonating. Though Snoekstra fleshes out her present-day protagonist far less than the phantom Bee, her smooth navigation through the twisty plot propels the reader along--until she finally hits the wall with a preposterous denouement. Agent: Mackenzie Fraser-Bub, Fraser-Bub Literary. (Sept.)

Donohue, Nanette. "Only Daughter." Booklist, 15 Sept. 2016, p. 27. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA464980838&it=r&asid=5bbf8859277488ec16639712949496d1. Accessed 12 Mar. 2017. Byers, Emily. "Snoekstra, Anna: Only Daughter." Library Journal, 1 Aug. 2016, p. 88. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA459805001&it=r&asid=a19cae022d0574522470c46e4dd2f676. Accessed 12 Mar. 2017. "Only Daughter." Publishers Weekly, 11 July 2016, p. 43. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA458915310&it=r&asid=aadf756608ad7c73126c63f2da3167f2. Accessed 12 Mar. 2017.

• Sydney Morning Herald
  http://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/books/only-daughter-review-anna-snoekstras-psychological-thriller-with-a-double-edge-20161020-gs71f2.html
  Word count: 562

  Quoted in Sidelights: Credulity may be stretched, and the conclusion a tad rushed, but Only Daughter will work well on screen. OCTOBER 29 2016
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  Only Daughter review: Anna Snoekstra's psychological thriller with a double edge

  Sue Turnbull
  CRIME FICTION
  Only Daughter
  ANNA SNOEKSTRA
  ​HARLEQUIN, $29.99
  With The Girl on the Train and Gone Girl already translated to film, can Only Daughter be far behind? Apparently the film rights for this debut novel by 25-year-old Canberra-born, Melbourne-based Anna Snoekstra have already been sold to Universal Pictures at a moment when the appetite for a psychological thriller with a domestic noir twist would appear insatiable.

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  Writer Anna Snoekstra.
  Writer Anna Snoekstra. Photo: Elesa Kurtz
  The major challenge for any producer wrangling the adaptation of Only Daughter will be finding two actresses who look alike – but not quite – given the unreliable narrator here is an imposter. Arrested for shoplifting, let's call her the fake Rebecca Winter, she attempts to avoid prosecution by pretending to be the real Rebecca Winter, who mysteriously disappeared 11 years ago after her shift at McDonald's.

  Cornered in a police interview room, Fake Rebecca conjures the memory of a reality crime show called Wanted in which Real Rebecca's unsolved case featured. At which point her then boyfriend marvelled at the resemblance between the two.

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  Only Daughter, by Anna Snoekstra.
  Only Daughter, by Anna Snoekstra. Photo: Supplied
  Fake Rebecca is an improviser and a survivor: "I've always been good at playing a part,"' she tells us from the start. Returned by the now-solicitous police to an unremarkable whitewashed family home in Canberra to reunite with her stunned parents and grown-up twin brothers, she is quick to pick up the clues of Real Rebecca's life while finding inventive ways to dodge the inevitable question posed by the dogged detective who headed the initial investigation: where has she been for the past 11 years?

  Meanwhile – and this is the Gone Girl double-narrative ploy – we have the story of the "real" Rebecca back in 2003 unfolding in tandem with the masquerade. While Fake Rebecca addresses us in her own voice, with the effect that we are implicated in her subterfuge because we think we know the truth about her, Real Rebecca's story unfolds in the third person, rendering us the helpless observers of her fate as she negotiates the trials and terrors of being an attractive 16-year-old, obsessed with boys, and not above the odd bit of shoplifting herself.

  But the terror, as always, lurks within. What appears to be a conventional girlhood in mind-numbing suburbia begins to look more and more sinister. Real Rebecca is disturbed by terrifying dreams that leech into her everyday life, dreams that eventually catch up with the Fake Rebecca too.

  Credulity may be stretched, and the conclusion a tad rushed, but Only Daughter will work well on screen. But will they set it in Canberra? Here's hoping.

• Kirkus
  https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/anna-snoekstra/only-daughter/
  Word count: 381

  Quoted in Sidelights: A premise that could collapse in a light breeze coupled with telegraphed plot twists make for an uninspired entry in the psychological thriller category.

  ONLY DAUGHTER
  by Anna Snoekstra
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  KIRKUS REVIEW

  After her arrest, a woman claims to be a long-missing teenage girl and finds herself living the vanished girl’s life only to become ensnared in trying to unravel the truth behind her disappearance.

  In 2003, 16-year-old Rebecca “Bec” Winter disappeared from a quiet street in Canberra, Australia. The usual investigation efforts stalled due to raging wildfires and came up empty. Fast-forward 11 years, and a woman is arrested for shoplifting in New South Wales. When asked her name, she panics and claims to be Bec because someone once told her she looked like the missing girl. Thus begins the first of too many preposterous occurrences that pepper Snoekstra’s debut. The lead detective on the case, Special Investigator Vincent Andopolis, is both thrilled and apprehensive to see Fake Bec: he can’t claim credit for having found her in a dark basement somewhere, and she’s unsurprisingly tight-lipped on the details of her “abduction.” Snoekstra alternates between present-day Fake Bec and 2003 Real Bec, building up to the day of her disappearance. The humdrum teenage world is full of dramatic best friends and a family that barely seems to acknowledge Bec’s existence, so focused is it on the happiness of her younger twin brothers, Andrew and Paul. Fake Bec struggles with the expected conundrums of trying to be someone else, heightened by the fact that the other person is a high-profile missing person: how do I maintain the facade? What really happened to my doppelgänger? Neither question is very compelling.

  A premise that could collapse in a light breeze coupled with telegraphed plot twists make for an uninspired entry in the psychological thriller category.

  Pub Date: Sept. 27th, 2016
  ISBN: 978-0-778-31944-3
  Page count: 278pp
  Publisher: Harlequin MIRA
  Review Posted Online: July 5th, 2016
  Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15th, 2016

• Pop Culture Beast
  http://www.popculturebeast.com/book-review-daughter-anna-snoekstra/
  Word count: 412

  great foreshadowing, as well as a few lovely red herrings. You will figure out the twist a few chapters before the end, but knowing how it plays out will keep you reading till the last word.

  Book Review: Only Daughter by Anna Snoekstra
  Robin Lynn09.2016Book Review, Books
  onlydaughterOnly Daughter, the debut novel from Anna Snokestra, is taughtly written, and gripped me from the introduction.

  Rebecca Winter disappeared in 2003. The only clue, her smashed cell phone, found in a ditch. Eleven years later, a woman, claiming to be Rebecca appears. The impostor eases herself into Bec, fooling everyone. At least, at first.

  Trying to stay one step ahead of the investigator, to keep him from learning about the deceit. Trying to reassure the family that it’s really her. Trying to pretend that she’s Bec keeps the impostor busy. Too busy, as she begins to find out that things in Bec’s life were not what they seemed. And that she’s in as much danger now as Bec was eleven years ago.

  Snokestra does a great job with POV and timeline shifts. The present day is narrated by the impostor, who is never given a name, and the events in 2003 are narrated by Bec. Too much detail into the plot, and the twists will spoil everything. But it’s an entirely different mystery/thriller/crime story. There was some great foreshadowing, that was well covered with innocuous details, as well as a few lovely red herrings. You will figure out the twist a few chapters before the end, but knowing how it plays out will keep you reading till the last word.

  As a warning, there are a few scenes of graphic animal cruelty and of violence towards people. They are pretty essential to the plot, but they are very graphic, and stomach turning. Be warned. They are near the end of the book, and in chapters from Bec’s POV.

  Fans of mystery, thrillers, and crime novels will enjoy Only Daughter. It’s also set in Australia, so some of the wording may seem a touch “off” for readers in the US. Nothing really strange, just not exactly the same word usage.

  Only Daughter
  Anna Snokestra
  Publisher: MIRA (September 20, 2016)
  Language: English
  ISBN-10: 077831944X
  ISBN-13: 978-0778319443
  Radiohead album review

  Robin Lynn

  8/10 stars

• Better Reading
  http://www.betterreading.com.au/news/book-of-the-week-only-daughter-by-anna-snoekstra/
  Word count: 725

  Snoekstra’s debut is truly stunning, a clever psychological thriller that gets right under your skin with its shrewd characterisation and original, multi-layered plot.
  a once-you-start-you-can’t-stop kind of thriller that keeps you on your toes until the very last pages.
  Book of the Week: Only Daughter by Anna Snoekstra
  September 20, 2016
  Why we love it: A startlingly good thriller set not in Stockholm, the home counties of England or east coast USA, but in… Canberra, Australia. Yep, that’s right. Only Daughter is the stunning crime fiction from the new kid on the block, Australian debut author Anna Snoekstra.

  Told from the point of view of a young woman on the run from her family – rich father and cold stepmother in Perth – and crimes she wants to forget, the young woman is presented with the opportunity to become Rebecca Winter, missing from her Canberra home for more than ten years and with whom she bears a striking resemblance. The detective who’s been working on the missing person case for all those years escorts the woman to the home of the missing girl to meet her long lost ‘parents’. In a bid to stay undetected the woman needs to get the detective on side and off track – not too difficult as she is clever and ruthless. She exploits the guilt that’s engulfing him at not having found the missing girl who’s now seemingly engineered her own escape.

  The Winter family embrace the young woman as their long-lost daughter and, once ensconced with them, the new Bec finds it all too cosy being in the midst of a loving family , after never having known one herself. She gets a little too comfortable in Bec’s old bedroom, she’s attracted to Bec’s best friend’s brother and even Bec’s own brothers. And though there’s a steely ruthlessness to her, she soon becomes sympathetic with Bec, who went missing when she was just 16. She becomes so absorbed in her new identity that sometimes she forgets she’s not Rebecca.

  In alternating chapters, the story is told by the real Rebecca Winter in the lead-up to her disappearance. The real Bec recounts the chilling, inexplicable occurrences in her home, as well as the ordinary musings of a teenage girl – her crappy job at the local Maccas, shoplifting sprees with her best friends, looking after her little, naughty twin brothers over the hot summer holidays, and her crushes on guys. As Rebecca and her imposter’s stories begin to merge, we’re drawn to a nail-biting race to find out what really happened to the real Bec and what will become of the woman who inhabits her the woman who inhabits her life, as the truth begins to close in on her.

  Snoekstra’s debut is truly stunning, a clever psychological thriller that gets right under your skin with its shrewd characterisation and original, multi-layered plot. Snoekstra’s being billed as our homegrown Gillian Flynn or Paula Hawkins and it’s not hard to see why. Be warned, Only Daughter is one of those thrillers that will have you turning the pages until way after midnight – a once-you-start-you-can’t-stop kind of thriller that keeps you on your toes until the very last pages. We’re not surprised it’s already been optioned for film and the same screenwriter as The Girl on the Train has written the script.

  Anna Snoekstra is a Canberra-born writer. At seventeen she decided to forgo a full-time job to move to Melbourne and become a writer. She studied creative writing and cinema at the University of Melbourne and screenwriting at RMIT. She has written for film, fringe theatre and has directed music videos, as well as working as cheesemonger, waitress, receptionist, cinema attendant and film reviewer! Only Daughter is her debut novel.

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  From Bluebeard to Gone Girl: why I’m proud to be part of the ‘domestic noir’ comeback (the Guardian) by Anna Snoekstra
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