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Nobody Is Ever Missing by Catherine Lacey
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Nobody Is Ever Missing

$17.96

Retail price: $19.95

Discount: 9%

This title is not eligible for purchase with membership credits. Why?

Length 6 hours 21 minutes
Language English
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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.

Catherine Lacey is the author of Nobody Is Ever Missing, winner of a 2016 Whiting Award and a finalist for the New York Public Library’s Young Lions Fiction Award, and The Answers. In 2017, she was named one of Granta’s Best of Young American Novelists. Her essays and fiction have been published widely and translated into Italian, French, Dutch, Spanish, and German. She was born in Mississippi and is based in Chicago.

Saskia Maarleveld is an experienced voice-over actress and Earphones Award–winning narrator. Raised in New Zealand and France, she is highly skilled with accents and dialects, and many of her books have been narrated entirely in accents other than her own. In addition to audiobooks, her voice can be heard in animation, video games, and commercials.

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When you start a new membership in support of local bookstores with the promo code SWITCH, you’ll get a bonus audiobook credit at sign-up.

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Reviews

“A serious, frequently brilliant novel with a sustained intensity that is rare in fiction.”

“Satisfies all my inchoate readerly impulses—including the primary one of getting out of my own skin and into someone else’s.”

“Searching, emotionally resonant…dreamy and fierce at the same time…[It] impressed me and held me to my chair.”

“Holds the reader rapt for 244 pages, vividly situating us—entrapping us, really.”

“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.”

“Lacey’s debut novel has emotional power, depth, and subtle humor.”

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