<P> Stephen Lewis is, by his own admission, an accidental author of children's books . One Saturday, on a routine visit to the supermarket, during a moment's distraction, he loses his only daughter, Kate . Since then, the only purpose in his life is that he is a member of a committee on childcare . Otherwise he spends his days lying on the sofa drinking scotch and watching mindless TV programmes and the Olympic games . His wife, Julie, has moved away and become a recluse, and he visits her very rarely . He has a close friend, Charles Darke, who published his first novel and who is now a junior Minister in the Cabinet, and the Prime Minister's favourite . Darke's own wife, Thelma, is a quantum physicist . She engages Stephen with her outlandish theories on time and space . However, his friends' lives are about to change irrevocably in a way he cannot understand, and he is a helpless bystander . </P> <P> Eventually Stephen experiences a strange event that he cannot explain: he sees his parents as a young couple in a pub, before they married . The book also deals with his grief and eventually his painful acceptance of the loss of his child . </P> <P> The book deals with the theory that time is relative, and can be fluid and unstructured . In one respect it can be viewed as a time travelling story . At the very core of the novel is the "child in time"--Stephen himself--appearing to his mother as a child's face at a window, which makes her decide to keep the child, him, rather than to abort . </P> <P> It also explores the way both Stephen's and Julie's lives disintegrate after Kate's disappearance, and how an unexpected event at the very end of the book may bring them back together . </P>

Who plays kate in the child in time