Nobody Is Ever Missing

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.

About the Author :
Catherine 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, the New York Public Library's Young Lions Fiction Award, and a New York Foundation for the Arts fellowship. She has been a finalist for the Dylan Thomas Prize and the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award and was named one of Granta's Best of Young American Novelists. Her essays and short fiction have appeared in the New Yorker, Harper's Magazine, the New York Times, The Believer, and elsewhere Saskia Maarleveld is an experienced voice-over actress, audiobook narrator, and three-time winner of the AudioFile Earphones Award. In addition to audiobooks, her voice can be heard in animation, video games, and commercials.

Review :
"A serious, frequently brilliant novel with a sustained intensity that is rare in fiction." -- "Wall Street Journal" "As Elyria increasingly feels that she is 'a human non sequitur' and perhaps 'a form of radiation, ' Lacey brilliantly captures her decline through long, winding sentences. Her descent is as harrowing as it is magnetic." -- "Cleveland Plain Dealer" "Holds the reader rapt for 244 pages, vividly situating us--entrapping us, really." -- "Chicago Tribune" "Lacey's debut novel has emotional power, depth, and subtle humor." -- "Publishers Weekly" "Satisfies all my inchoate readerly impulses--including the primary one of getting out of my own skin and into someone else's." -- "New Yorker" "Searching, emotionally resonant...dreamy and fierce at the same time...[It] impressed me and held me to my chair." -- "New York Times"