Hostage - Facts

 Sophia, the little girl in this novel, has certain conditions due to the way she was looked after in the first months of her life.

Hyperlexia is a syndrome characterized by a child's precocious ability to read. 

She also has problems of attachment and distrusts those who she is supposed to love. Attachment disorder is a broad term intended to describe disorders of mood, behavior, and social relationships arising from unavailability of normal socializing care and attention from primary caregiving figures in early childhood. Such a failure would result from unusual early experiences of neglect, abuse, abrupt separation from caregivers between three months and three years of age, frequent change or excessive numbers of caregivers, or lack of caregiver responsiveness to child communicative efforts resulting in a lack of basic trust.

Pathological demand avoidance or extreme demand avoidance is a proposed disorder, and proposed sub-type of autism spectrum disorder, defined by characteristics such as a demand avoidance—which is a greater-than-typical refusal to comply with requests or expectations—and extreme efforts to avoid social demands. 

Sophia and her parents live in Harlington. Harlington is a village and civil parish located in Bedfordshire near the M1 motorway.