Nobody Is Ever Missing | Granta

  • Published: 24/12/2015
  • ISBN: 9781783780891
  • 129x20mm
  • 256 pages

Nobody Is Ever Missing

Catherine Lacey

Without telling her family, Elyria takes a one-way flight to New Zealand, abruptly leaving her stable life in Manhattan, her home, her career and her loving husband. As the people she has left behind scramble to figure out what has happened to her, Elyria embarks on a hitchhiker’s odyssey, testing fate by travelling in the cars of overly kind women and deeply strange men, tacitly being swept into the lives of strangers, and sleeping in fields, forests, and public parks. As she journeys from Wellington to Picton, Takaka, Kaikoura and onwards she asks herself, what is it that I am missing? How can a person be missing?

Full of mordant humour and uncanny insights, Nobody Is Ever Missing is a startling tale of love, loss, and the dangers encountered in the search for self-knowledge. It is a novel which goes far beyond the story of a physical journey and asks what it means to be human, to be a woman, and to be at the mercy of forces beyond one’s own control.

Wry, surprising and blackly funny... a novel of uncomfortable power

Justine Jordan, Guardian

Witty, knowing and lyrical

Spectator

[A novel] of striking intelligence and originality... arresting and highly accomplished

Daily Mail

The Author

Catherine Lacey is the author of four books: Nobody Is Ever Missing, The Answers, Certain American States and Pew. Her work has appeared in Harper’s, Vogue, the New York Times and elsewhere. She is a Granta Best of Young American Novelist, a Guggenheim Fellow and the winner of the 2021 New York Public Library’s Young Lions Fiction Award. ‘Biography of X’ is an extract from her novel of the same title, forthcoming in 2023 from Granta Books in the UK and Farrar, Straus & Giroux in the US.

More about the author →

From the Same Author

Catherine Lacey on Granta.com

Fiction | Granta 162

Biography of X

Catherine Lacey

‘Grief has a warring logic; it always wants something impossible, something worse and something better.’

An extract from Biography of X by Catherine Lacey.

Fiction | Granta Books

Pew

Catherine Lacey

‘The church has no thoughts. The church is brick and glass. If they ever slept there, they would see that.’

In Conversation | Granta Books

Catherine Lacey | Granta’s Best of Young American Novelists

Catherine Lacey & Luke Neima

Catherine Lacey discuses voice, characterization and the minute details that bring a story to life