Nobody Is Ever Missing: A Novel
"Ms. Lacey has written a serious, frequently brilliant novel with a sustained intensity that is rare in fiction. It's the most promising first novel that I've encountered this year." —Sam Sacks,The Wall Street Journal"The premise begins simply enough: Elyria has unexpectedly left her husband. And yet the proceeding narrative introduces some of contemporary fiction’s most complex personal introspection as Catherine Lacey—with the ease of a master—depicts a mind that may, or may not, be breaking down . . . Elyria hitchhikes, meets a handful of characters and thinks. And her ponderings—written in Lacey’s consistently remarkable, urgent prose style—slowly unravel the layers of Elyria’s discontent, revealing an expanse of universal anxiety and uncertainty. Her observations of the country and her ruminations on the past are simultaneously childlike in their wonder and astounding in their depth. Page after page, the novel strikes those rarely accomplished balances between action and interiority, comedy and bleakness, stream-of-consciousness and clarity. An uncomplicated plot written with honesty and linguistic deftness characterizes many of the world’s great novels, including this debut. As the story concludes, Lacey does not assert any sense of closure because there are no lessons here, only a stunning portrait of, to paraphrase Doris Lessing, a woman going mad all by herself." —Tiffany Gibert,Time Out New York"Lacey’s wise and dazzling novel... is funny, not in a zany way, but in the audaciously morbid way a Coen brothers picture is funny." —Jennifer B. McDonald,Slate"[A] laser smart, affecting, confounding, recalcitrant, infuriating, relentlessly stylish debut novel . . . Using short chapters to stop for breath, Lacey stacks clause upon clause with unerring rhythm, one of those glorious gifts that not everyone's been given and guided by that fabulous inner ear she teases out assonances and upends predictable constructions, modulating her phrases with repetitions, inversions, and tautly-strung wit, the novel propelled by sentences that wind their way inward before springing back out with renewed velocity." —Nathan Huffstutter,Electric Literature"Catherine Lacey's debut novel explores that deeply human question... She holds the reader rapt for 244 pages, vividly situating us—entrapping us, really." —Laura Pearson,Chicago Tribune"Catherine Lacey's virtuosic debut is a gutsy, lyric meditation on identity, love, transformation, and what it means to be free. It is a breathtakingly accomplished novel, and Catherine Lacey is a riveting new voice in contemporary fiction." —Laura van den Berg, author ofThe Isleof Youth"A dense, subtle series of meditations on domestication, estrangement, wildness, and above all, loss and absence." —David Shields, author ofHow Literature Saved My Lifeand coauthor ofSalinger"Catherine Lacey has a magic voice like none I’ve ever read before. An unknown cousin of both David Markson’sWittgenstein’s Mistressand Marilynne Robinson’sHousekeeping,Nobody Is EverMissingis a fabulously intelligent and witty book, and also a very moving one." —Rivka Galchen, author ofAmericanInnovations"This book lives and breathes. It is a squall and Catherine Lacey is a force." —Amelia Gray, author ofThreats"A dark, precise jewel of a novel that does what every piece of writing should: cast a subtly new light on the world around us." —John Wray, author ofLowboy