Elizabeth is Missing

Deeply empathetic and humane.

[A] spellbinding first novel

Brilliant . . . an unforgettable novel.

A painfully sad but brilliant debut.

Arresting . . . chilling . . . touching.

Deeply charming mystery yarn . . . add it to your summer reading list. 

A tender but not sentimental book — charming but never cloying. And in Maud, Healey has found a fascinating voice: a heroine suffering from memory loss who is herself hard to forget.

Bold, touching and hugely memorable

Healey . . . compassionately draws the landscape of Maud’s mind, layering the past over the present, blurring the lines between reality and memory . . . A poignant novel of loss.

A remarkably insightful and gripping debut novel. With consummate skill, Emma Healey portrays Maud as an aging grandmother and as a teenager during the war years in Britain. The parallel stories about a missing friend and missing sister are equally convincing, flawlessly interwoven, and beautifully written with tenderness, truth and wisdom. The urgency of finding and putting together the pieces of life’s puzzles, whether their loss is due to fractured memory or adult secrets, is a universal dilemma, and it kept me riveted. I couldn’t put the book down until I read the last sentence, and I wondered how a writer still in her twenties could accomplish this feat of storytelling about the intensity of family ties and the deathless power of its love. I can’t wait to see what she does next.