Nobody Is Ever Missing: A Novel

“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

“[A] searching, emotionally resonant first novel . . . [Nobody Is Ever Missing] impressed me, and held me to my chair. There’s significant talent at work here.” ―Dwight Garner, The New York Times

The 10th anniversary reissue of Catherine Lacey’s beloved, star-making debut novel Nobody Is Ever Missing: a mordant, uncanny, and unputdownable journey into one woman’s attempt to break free of her life.

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 perilous 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 wrong. 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, Lacey whittles away at the rage within Elyria and exposes the very real, very knowable anxiety of the human condition. A sensation upon its release in 2014 and the introduction to a singular literary talent, Lacey’s debut novel Nobody Is Ever Missing radiates the same intensity and invention it did upon its publication, and remains an unrelenting, unputdownable search for the dark heart of the self.