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Summary
Summary
NOW A BBC ONE MOVIE STARRING GLENDA JACKSON
HOW DO YOU SOLVE A MYSTERY WHEN YOU CAN'T REMEMBER THE CLUES?
In this darkly riveting debut novel--a sophisticated psychological mystery that is also an heartbreakingly honest meditation on memory, identity, and aging--an elderly woman descending into dementia embarks on a desperate quest to find the best friend she believes has disappeared, and her search for the truth will go back decades and have shattering consequences.
Maud, an aging grandmother, is slowly losing her memory--and her grip on everyday life. Yet she refuses to forget her best friend Elizabeth, whom she is convinced is missing and in terrible danger.
But no one will listen to Maud--not her frustrated daughter, Helen, not her caretakers, not the police, and especially not Elizabeth's mercurial son, Peter. Armed with handwritten notes she leaves for herself and an overwhelming feeling that Elizabeth needs her help, Maud resolves to discover the truth and save her beloved friend.
This singular obsession forms a cornerstone of Maud's rapidly dissolving present. But the clues she discovers seem only to lead her deeper into her past, to another unsolved disappearance: her sister, Sukey, who vanished shortly after World War II.
As vivid memories of a tragedy that occurred more fifty years ago come flooding back, Maud discovers new momentum in her search for her friend. Could the mystery of Sukey's disappearance hold the key to finding Elizabeth?
Author Notes
Emma Healey is a Montreal-based writer and the founder and editor-in-chief of the Incongruous Quarterly, an online literary magazine devoted to the publication of unpublishable literature. Her fiction and poetry have appeared in magazines such as Matrix, Broken Pencil and the Void, and in various online publications including Joyland, Said the Gramophone, Cellstories, an Lemon Hound. Her work has been featured in the anthologies Can'tLit: Fearless Fiction from Broken Pencil Magazine and Gulch: An Anthology of Poetry and Prose. Her poem "The National Research Council Official Time Signal" was published as a limited-edition monograph by No Press in 2011. She was the 2010 recipient of the Irving Layton award for poetry and was shortlisted for the same award in 2011 and 2012. She was the recipient of the Irving Layton Award for Creative Writing in both 2010 and 2013, a National Magazine Award nominee in 2015, and a finalist for the K.M. Hunter award in 2016.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
British author Healey draws on her own grandmothers' experiences to create the distinctive narrator of her first novel. Maud Horsham can no longer function safely in the present, and one of the unanswered questions of this sad, unsettling psychological mystery is why Maud lives alone in the south of England, with only a little part-time help and daily visits from Helen, her grown daughter. When Maud becomes obsessed with the apparent disappearance of Elizabeth, "the only friend I have left," her already erratic life becomes chaotic. All of her attempts to find Elizabeth, including visits to the police, are unsuccessful. Meanwhile, Maud's search for Elizabeth elicits memories of another disappearance-that of her sister, Sukey, back in 1948. Few readers may want to journey through the mind of a person with dementia, but Healey demonstrates that an absorbing tale can indeed be written from such a perspective. Agent: Karolina Sutton, Curtis Brown (U.K.). (June) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Kirkus Review
Maud's memory is failing, slipping further away each day. So how can she convince anyone that her best friend is truly missing?In her debut novel, Healey deftly evokes the frustrations of Maud and her daughter, both annoyed by Maud's inability to remember that she bought peach slices yesterday (not to mention the day before), or her own address or the fact that she's already alerted the police to Elizabeth's absence four times. Large and small notes blanket the house and fill Maud's purse with reminders (no more peaches; Elizabeth's son says she's OK), but Maud disregards or mistrusts them, questioning her daughter's authority and Elizabeth's son's truthfulness. Healey also compassionately draws the landscape of Maud's mind, layering the past over the present, blurring the lines between reality and memory. Just as she's worried about Elizabeth in the present, she's troubled by events from her childhood in post-World War II London. Then, she and her parents had a lodger, Douglas. Her sister, Sukey, lived with her husband, Frank, in a big house crammed with odds and ends collected through his furniture-moving business. But Sukey disappeared, too. Both Douglas and Frank were briefly considered suspects. Certainly, Douglas' close friendship with Sukey and Frank's mysterious business dealings raised some hackles. But a lack of evidence prompted officials to determine that Sukey likely just ran away. But Maud never believed that her beloved sister would have left of her own accord without saying goodbye. Could the two mysteries be connected? With little to no assistance from the police, then or now, the family must band together to discover the truth. At first, Maud's disintegrating memory stymies her progress, but soon enough, the elision of boundaries becomes an asset.A poignant novel of loss. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Your best friend doesn't respond to calls or knocks on the door. A moving van is loaded with your friend's possessions. Your friend's son, a nasty, grasping type, seems to have taken over. You report what's going on to the police, to your daughter, to anyone who will listen. No one believes you. You hardly know whether to believe yourself since you know that your memory, lately, has gotten so bad. This is the predicament facing Maud Horsham, a woman who survived the London Blitz and is now sinking into dementia. Part of the wallop of this mystery is that a woman with declining memory and mental powers is placed in the position of detective. This adds to the urgency of her quest, since Maud is battling the condescension of her caretakers, the police, and her daughter as her faculties fade. Another part of the power of this debut novel is that Maud is the narrator; this choice of point of view gives readers a lens on the casual cruelties inflicted on the aging, especially those with dementia. Maud writes everything down, to help her remember clues about her missing friend, and she also writes down how she is treated. Maud focuses on a second mystery as well, the disappearance of her sister, Sukey, after the war. Part mystery, part meditation on memory, part Dickensian revelation of how apparent charity may hurt its recipients, this is altogether brilliant.--Fletcher, Connie Copyright 2010 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
SOME STORIES ARE so sad, you want them to have the comfort of a gentle storytelling voice. Tom Bouman extends that kindness in DRY BONES IN THE VALLEY (Norton, $24.95), his beautifully written first novel set in the mountainous region of northeastern Pennsylvania that sits atop the Marcellus Shale, a vast geological treasure, prized and exploited for its natural gas resources. With neighbors feuding over whether to lease drilling rights to companies accused of poisoning the environment, it's no wonder that a crazy old recluse like Aubrey Dunigan would be testy with anyone he finds hanging around his decrepit farm. But these hills are also overrun with meth cookers, dope dealers and Mexican drug cartels. So just because a stranger is found dead on his property doesn't make poor old Aubrey a murderer. Officer Henry Farrell is one of those stoic heroes who see what's in front of their eyes but refuse to let it break their hearts. He plays the fiddle on Tuesday nights with friends who can pick out old bluegrass tunes. He hunts deer and keeps his gun clean, although he can't help feeling bad that the woods are "full of junk," strewn with the detritus of thoughtlessly lived lives. The broader story Bouman tells is more disheartening than the murder story. It's about a hopeless generation of rural Americans who no longer work their own land - if they have any land left and if they have any work at all. Suspicious people living with guard dogs in trailers and abandoned school buses, they're so filled with blind hatred for any kind of authority that they can't see the ground opening up under their feet. WHERE DO THEY go, all those memories that are lost when a mind begins to fail? And who has the courage to set off in search of them? Maud Horsham, the narrator of Emma Healey's spellbinding first novel, ELIZABETH IS MISSING (Harper, $25.99), is aware that she's slipping into dementia. So she depends on the handwritten notes she calls "my paper memory" to remind herself not to buy any more canned peaches or try to cook. She must also remember to look for her best friend, who has disappeared and may be dead, possibly murdered. "I can see they won't listen, won't take me seriously," Maud says of her daughter and the various caretakers who dismiss her concerns. "So I must do something. I must, because Elizabeth is missing." Maud makes her way to Elizabeth's eerily empty house, to the church Elizabeth no longer attends, to the charity shop where they met as volunteer workers and to the local police station, where she's rudely patronized by the same officer who brushed her aside on previous visits. Healey's narrative takes its structure from the shifting patterns of Maud's thoughts, pursuing what appear to be random images back to postwar Britain, when her sister left her husband and simply vanished. No one in authority paid much attention to that either, not when so many wives were running away from hasty war marriages that the newspapers tried to reach them with public pleas. In Maud's deteriorating mind, the two mysteries become so entwined that a fresh clue can dislodge associations from the past yet also make sense in the present. It's a sad and lonely business, watching your identity slowly slip away. But even at the end, Maud insists on making herself heard and understood. WITH CAMPUS VIOLENCE now embedded in our social culture, the classic academic mystery could use an overhaul. Lori Rader-Day gives it the old college try in THE BLACK HOUR (Seventh Street Books, paper, $15.95) by putting familiar genre conventions (the killer on campus, the faculty member as amateur detective, the back-stabbing at the president's reception) in a more realistic context. Amelia Emmet, the sociology professor playing sleuth, not only teaches the "Sociology of Deviance and Crime" but was also the victim of a campus shooting, a crime the teaching assistant with whom she shares the narrative is secretly researching. The traditional whodunit procedures feel so contrived that the background material makes better reading, offering insights into the operation of a student-run suicide hotline and debunking the old myth that someone whose roommate commits suicide automatically gets a single room - without charge - the following semester. ANTONIO HILL'S first novel, "The Summer of Dead Toys," introduced Inspector Héctor Salgado, a temperamental detective with the Catalan police force. Contemptuous of the conformity, hypocrisy and decadence he finds in Barcelona, his adopted city, this moody Argentine lives by the philosophy of his native country's dance. ("As the tangos say, life isn't fair. I pity anyone who thinks otherwise.") Salgado's cynicism runs deeper and darker in THE GOOD SUICIDES (Crown, $26), which presents him with an extraordinary case. After being warned with a cryptic message attached to a photo of three hanged dogs, the senior executives of a successful cosmetics firm begin killing themselves in gruesome ways. The macabre premise is a shocker, but Salgado is the real surprise: a tough cop with the sensitivity to be distressed that no absolution has been granted to these unfortunate men. There are "no good or bad suicides," he glumly acknowledges. "Taking one's own life was the ultimate sin. But if we don't even have that, what is left to us?"
Library Journal Review
Maud's memory is going quickly. She doesn't always know who her daughter is and ends up buying cans of peaches at the store every time she shops because she can't figure out how to find the items on her list. One thing Maud is sure of though, her friend Elizabeth is missing. But she can't convince anyone else. So Maud leaves herself notes and attempts to visit Elizabeth, only to be turned away by her angry son, Peter. Maud's investigative attempts also awaken memories of an earlier disappearance, that of her sister Sukey many years ago. Where Maud has difficulty keeping track of her current life from moment to moment, the past becomes clearer and forms a disturbing picture-one that may connect to the missing Elizabeth. VERDICT Delving into the mind of a woman suffering from dementia, Healey uses her unreliable narrator to create realistic tension. Suspenseful and emotional in equal parts, the author's debut hits all the right notes. Fans of other books with questionable narrators like Alice LaPlante's Turn of Mind and S.J. Watson's Before I Go To Sleep will find much to love here. [See Prepub Alert, 1/6/14.]-Jane -Jorgenson, Madison P.L., WI (c) Copyright 2014. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.