Elizabeth is Missing

A page-turner of a detective story. If I had to describe it in one word, it would be beautiful. It is a gripping thriller, but it's also about life and love... This is an extraordinary tale of believable, ordinary tragedy. Definitely one for the shortlists and the book clubs. Independent

Deeply empathetic and humane.

‘[A] cracking debut . . . Memento written by Alan Bennett’ Telegraph

So Elizabeth Is Missing by Emma Healey is very good indeed. Thriller, as seen through the eyes of a woman with dementia. Jojo Moyes

[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. 

Normally a well-observed, literary novel that accurately shows us ourselves by deepening our knowledge of what it is to be human cannot manage, as well, to be both a comedy and a thriller. Elizabeth is Missing, however, encompasses these genres and deserves prizes in all categories . . . If I had to describe it in one word, it would be beautiful. It is a gripping thriller, but it's also about life and love . . . This is an extraordinary tale of believable, ordinary tragedy. Definitely one for the shortlists and the book clubs. Philippa Perry
The Independent

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

Emma Healey has a gift for the kind of dark comedy that can shine through any predicament . . . This is a commendably well-crafted story, and flowers finally into a moving one. Guardian

A very good novel and highly impressive for a debut. It's a rare imagining of a character pushing 90 years of age . . . Healey has a wonderful feel for language, and Elizabeth's state of mind allows her to describe mundane details with intricacy and emotional depth Observer

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.

ELIZABETH IS MISSING will stir and shake you: an investigation into a seventy-year-old crime, through the eyes of the most likeably unreliable of narrators. But the real mystery at its compassionate core is the fragmentation of the human mind. Emma Donoghue

I loved Elizabeth Is Missing. In this charmingly clever debut, Emma Healey delivers an empathetic twist on a classic detective tale. Her carefully observed sleuth, Maud, must outwit the trickiest and most elusive of all foes: Her own mind. Claire Cameron
author of The Bear

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.

Part mystery, part meditation on memory, part Dickensian revelation of how apparent charity may hurt its recipients, this is altogether brilliant. Booklist
Full Review

Elizabeth Is Missing is every bit as compelling as the frenzied hype suggests . . . The novel is both a gripping detective yarn and a haunting depiction of mental illness, but also more poignant and blackly comic than you might expect from that description . . . Perhaps Healey's greatest achievement is the flawless voice she creates for Maud. Observer
2014 Preview

[A] dark and riveting psychological thriller Stylist
Best Books of 2014 Full Review

This novel genuinely is one of those semi-mythical beasts, the book you cannot put down. Jonathan Coe

A thrillingly assured, haunting and unsettling novel, I read it at a gulp. Deborah Moggach