Nobody Is Ever Missing: A Novel

ISBN: 0374534497

Condition: New

About the AuthorCatherine Lacey is the author of the novels Nobody Is Ever Missing, The Answers, and Pew, and the short story collection Certain American States. She has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Whiting Award, and a New York Foundation for the Arts fellowship. She was a finalist, twice, for the New York Public Librarys Young Lions Fiction Award, along with the Dylan Thomas Prize and the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award, and was named one of Grantas Best of Young American Novelists. Her essays and short fiction have appeared in The New Yorker, Harpers Magazine, The New York Times, The Believer, and elsewhere. Born in Mississippi, she is based in Chicago.Product DescriptionIn the spirit of Haruki Murakami and Amelia Gray, Catherine Lacey's Nobody Is Ever Missing is full of mordant humor and uncanny insights, as Elyria waffles between obsession and numbness in the face of love, loss, danger, and self-knowledge.Without telling her family, Elyria takes a one-way flight to New Zealand, abruptly leaving her stable but unfulfilling life in Manhattan. As her husband scrambles to figure out what happened to her, Elyria hurtles into the unknown, testing fate by hitchhiking, tacitly being swept into the lives of strangers, and sleeping in fields, forests, and public parks.Her risky and often surreal encounters with the people and wildlife of New Zealand propel Elyria deeper into her deteriorating mind. Haunted by her sister's death and consumed by an inner violence, her growing rage remains so expertly concealed that those who meet her sense nothing unwell. This discord between her inner and outer reality leads her to another obsession: If her truest self is invisible and unknowable to others, is she even alive?The risks Elyria takes on her journey are paralleled by the risks Catherine Lacey takes on the page. In urgent, spiraling prose she whittles away at the rage within Elyria and exposes the very real, very knowable anxiety of the human condition. And yet somehow Lacey manages to poke fun at her unrelenting self-consciousness, her high-stakes search for the dark heart of the self.ReviewMs. Lacey has written a serious, frequently brilliant novel with a sustained intensity that is rare in fiction. It's the most promising first novel that I've encountered this year. -Sam Sacks, The Wall Street Journal[A] searching, emotionally resonant first novel[Lacey's prose is] dreamy and fierce at the same timeMs. Lacey's slim novel impressed me, and held me to my chair. There's significant talent at work here"Nobody Is Ever Missing" gets so much right that you easily push past its small flaws. It's an aching portrait of a young woman doing the hard thing, "trying to think clearly about mixed feelings. -Dwight Garner, The New York TimesThis is how much I liked Catherine Lacey's debut novel, Nobody Is Ever Missing: I read it over a summer weekend, mostly transfixed, earmarking nearly every other page to identify perceptions or turns of phrase I might wish to return to . . . Nobody Is Ever Missing satisfies all my inchoate readerly impulses--including the primary one of getting out of my own skin and into someone else's--in a way that, say, Donna Tartt's more explicitly pitched The Goldfinch decidedly does not. -Daphne Merkin, The New YorkerThe premise begins simply enough: Elyria has unexpectedly left her husband. And yet the proceeding narrative introduces some of contemporary fiction's most complex personal introspection as Catherine Lacey--with the ease of a master--depicts a mind that may, or may not, be breaking down . . . Elyria hitchhikes, meets a handful of characters and thinks. -Tiffany Gibert, Time Out New YorkLacey's wise and dazzling novel... is funny, not in a zany way, but in the audaciously morbid way a Coen brothers picture is funny. -Jennifer B. McDonald, Slate[A] laser smart, affecting, confounding, recalcitrant, infuriating, relentlessly stylish debut novel . . . Using short chapters