Nobody Is Ever Missing

Author: Catherine Lacey

Stock information

General Fields

  • : $19.99 AUD
  • : 9781783780891
  • : Granta Books
  • : Granta Books
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  • : 0.184
  • : December 2015
  • : 198mm X 129mm X 17mm
  • : United Kingdom
  • : 19.99
  • : January 2016
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  • :
  • : books

Special Fields

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  • :
  • : Catherine Lacey
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  • : Paperback
  • :
  • : 256
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Barcode 9781783780891
9781783780891

Description

You can run all the way to New Zealand, but eventually you'll catch up with yourself. 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. In the spirit of Haruki Murakami and Amelia Gray, 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.

Promotion info

This dazzling, dark novel follows a young woman called Elyria as she hitchhikes across the wilds of New Zealand, fleeing from her marriage and her sorrows, searching for what's missing

Author description

CATHERINE LACEY is the recipient of a 2012 NYFA Artist's Fellowship in Fiction Writing. She has published interviews, stories and non-fiction in various journals and magazines including McSweeney's, The Believer, the Atlantic, 52 Stories and Brooklyn Magazine. Her second novel is forthcoming from Granta Books.