'A page-turner with a mystery to solve, and a meditation on what it means for a child to know their parents' - Cathy Rentzenbrink
'An exceptional, entirely unpredictable, real-life thriller' - Michael Mansfield
'An astonishingly original memoir about truth, identity and the ethics of science' The Telegraph
'Gripping' The Times

WINNER OF THE BRIDPORT PRIZE FOR MEMOIR

Renowned scientist Professor Michael Briggs was many things:
A Space expert at NASA
An adviser to the World Health Organisation
A successful Big Pharma executive

But Michael Briggs had a secret.

A scandal broke out in 1986 when research he conducted was revealed to be compromised. Patients were also claiming that a pregnancy test he pioneered had caused devastating birth defects. Soon after his fall from grace, Briggs was dead, struck down by a mystery illness in a foreign country

Briggs left behind a long list of publications, patents, and inventions. But he also left behind hundreds of people who believe they are victims of his negligence and who are still fighting for justice to this day.

And he left someone else: his daughter, Joanne. After decades of wondering who her father really was, Joanne decided to investigate for herself. In hypnotic prose, she uncovers the secret that shaped her father's entire life and made his story more fantastic than any science fiction. As she discovered, Briggs's greatest invention was himself.

'A page-turner with a mystery to solve, and a meditation on what it means for a child to know their parents' -- Cathy Rentzenbrink
'An astonishingly original memoir about truth, identity and the ethics of science.' -- Ian Sansom * The Telegraph *
Gripping -- Alice O'Keeffe * The Times *
An exceptional, entirely unpredictable, real-life thriller, this is not about death but life: how it is lived and perceived, what is real and what is not. Told from the inside, where it hurts the most. In today's world, in the face of AI, fake news, the abandonment of fact checking and deep fake identities, Joanne, lawyer turned truth-sleuth, keeps you hooked throughout anticipating the next revelation as she crosses the boundaries of belief. Far, far stranger than fiction and far more salutary. -- Michael Mansfield * author of The Power In The People *
Briggs is able to make her narrative a page-turner... The wonderful writing style here sweeps between investigative journalism (it's a core merit of the book) to a compound of magical realism and first-rate travel writing. Joanne's viewpoint can flit from the macro to the everyday as if she is staring through the holes of the hag stones that her mother, a Blakean mystic, would collect at low tide on a Sussex beach... a debut book that shows charm, modesty, courage, and exceptional honesty. * Plays International *

Joanne's debut book, The Scientist Who Wasn't There, was awarded the first Bridport Prize for memoir in April 2023. She was a barrister for many years and has continued to work in other legal roles, in a career spanning nearly four decades. She lives in Sussex.