Nobody Is Ever Missing

By: Catherine Lacey

Narrated by: Saskia Maarleveld

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 in the story. 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.

©2014 Catherine Lacey (P)2016 Blackstone Audio, Inc.

Sad book

I really didn’t like this book! The authors style of description drove me crazy. Depressing tragic story. I never want to be in this character’s head!

It was okay.

The book never really went anywhere and I really wanted it to. Worth listening to on audio.

Don't read.

I kept waiting for it to get better. I kept waiting for it to have an actual story. It never did.

Interesting, painful, clever writing

Deep look at depression undiagnosed and untreated. The amazement of the mind and the awareness one can hold. I appreciate the quality of the writing, the art form of words into feelings and those into short moments. Brutal ending in a loop of many loops. Because everyone you go there you are.

I loved it

I hesitated to purchase based on some of the bad reviews. But it is our Book Club’s choice this month and l am so glad I was thus pushed to listen to the wonderful reading by Catherine Lacey. I was mesmerized and listened to the whole book in one day. It is beautifully written and poignant and sad and often funny.