Books › Nobody Is Ever Missing, A Novel
Nobody Is Ever Missing, A Novel
266 pages
A darkly funny, deeply unsettling plunge into the mind of a woman trying to outrun her own existence.
What it feels like
Reading this novel feels like being trapped inside a beautiful, terrifying panic attack. It is an intensely interior, restless experience that mirrors the aimless, hitchhiking journey of its protagonist across a surreal New Zealand landscape. The prose is the star here, breathless, recursive, and spiraling, pulling you deep into a mind that is actively trying to unspool itself. Despite the heavy undercurrents of unprocessed grief and concealed rage, there is a sharp, mordant humor that cuts through the claustrophobia, making the existential dread surprisingly digestible. It moves with a meandering but obsessive rhythm, perfectly capturing the feeling of being deeply alienated from one's own life. This is a must-read for anyone who loves unapologetically messy, introspective narratives about women pushed to the absolute edge of their own selfhood.
- Mood
- surreal
- claustrophobic
- uncanny
- restless
- alienating
- Tone
- wry
- urgent
- detached
- darkly comic
- introspective
- Pace
- meandering
- Themes
- the burden of selfhood · unprocessed grief · female rage · escapism and isolation · the illusion of stability
- The writing
- Urgent, breathless, and recursively spiraling, the sentences mirror the protagonist's obsessive, unraveling mind.
- The arc
- A slow, spiraling descent into the raw, unspooled edges of a fractured psyche, moving from numb detachment to a terrifyingly vast existential void.
- Who it's for
- Readers who crave intensely interior, psychologically complex narratives about messy, unlikable women running away from their lives.
Content notes
- suicide of a sibling
- mental illness and dissociation
- animal cruelty
- reckless endangerment
About the book
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.
Description from Open Library.
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