- this edition read as an e-book on BorrowBox through my local library
- Published: 9 June 2026, Penguin
- ISBN: 9781804997888
- Pages: 416
- Awards
2026 Barry Award for Best Novel (nominee)
2026 Theakston Old Peculier Crime Novel of the Year (longlist)
Synopsis (Penguin)
What could be so important that even a child will risk her life for it?
On a summer’s evening in 1926, six-year-old Celie Shepherd is hungry and desperate and not where a six-year-old should be. Instead she is dangling from a cliff, far above the sea, reaching out to pocket an impossibly beautiful thing.
This bold theft will change the course of Celie’s life, and the lives of others.
One hundred years later, a house is ransacked. The only thing missing: a dusty case containing that same impossible thing.
What could conceivably be so important that it is stolen again and again (and perhaps yet again . . . )?
So begins this extraordinary mystery from award-winning Belinda Bauer.
A taut, wonderfully imagined novel brimming with skulduggery at every turn, The Impossible Thing is a blazing testament to Belinda Bauer’s status as one of our greatest living crime writers.
My Take
This novel combines the historical with crime. The historic theme is one that most readers would not be familiar with: the trade in bird's eggs in the 20th century, now outlawed in the 21st. The fact that some eggs were so highly prized because of their size and their colour and because they were so difficult to get to.
In 1926, a young girl named Celie finds an "impossible" rare scarlet/red guillemot egg on the Yorkshire cliffs. A century later, Patrick Fort (the neurodivergent protagonist returning from Bauer's previous novel Rubbernecker) and his friend Nick set out to track down the historical red egg after Nick's home is ransacked and the artifact is stolen.
An intriguing and entertaining read.
My rating: 4.5
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