Eight Unforgettable Books About Missing Persons

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A missing person is a story that doesn’t end. We grapple to make sense, to decipher, to make meaning out of something so unfathomable. Jon Billman refers to the ‘purgatorial underworld of the vanished,’ a description that makes infinite sense to me. The missing are perpetually caught in an in-between place, not here but not gone. Stories about missing persons respond to this cultural anxiety, their narratives plotting explanations or recovering and remembering the missing person, refusing their oblivion.

In my novel Tell Me What I Am a woman goes missing leaving behind her four-year-old daughter and sister. They alternately narrate the story of what happened and, I like to think, together engage in act of recovery.

Then She Was Gone by Lisa Jewell

Jewell’s psychological thriller moves between timelines and narrators to create a complex and disturbing story about a missing girl. Ellie Mack disappears just weeks before her GSCEs. Her mother Laurel can’t get past her ‘raw need to keep the search going’ and, a decade later, finds herself completely alone, her husband and other children living their own lives elsewhere. Then, Laurel meets a man whose nine year old daughter who bears an uncanny resemblance to Ellie. The tension is intensified by Jewell’s use of multiple narrators, two of whom narrate in the first person and know something about Ellie’s disappearance.

Songs for the Missing by Stewart O’Nan

In the summer of 2005, 18-year-old Kim Larsen vanishes on her way to work. Her Chevette is found several days later in a nearby town. O’Nan resists generic expectations, side-lining the true-crime thriller elements to offer a compassionate portrait of a family afraid to give up in the face of tragedy. Narrated alternately by Kim’s mother, father and fifteen-year-old sister, O’Nan shows us a different kind of procedural: endless waiting, spending nights with the ‘missing’ on websites as her sister does, or taking pills to fall into unconsciousness like her mother. Perhaps the most devastating character is the father, desperately driving up and down highways distributing flyers, trying to keep his daughter in the public consciousness.

Nox by Anne Carson

Carson’s brother Michael disappeared in 1978 to escape imprisonment and for two decades wandered, making minimum contact with his family before his death in 2000. Nox is an elegy, an experimental poem, narrating his story through ephemera – scribbled notes, photographs, sketches, fragments of phone conversations all stapled in, glued on, copied. This handmade, tactile book felled me, showing how words can resist oblivion and forgetting. ‘A brother never ends,’ she writes. 

I Was Amelia Earhart by Jane Mendelsohn

Amelia Earhart’s disappearance in 1937 during her attempt to circumnavigate the world is deeply fixed in the public imaginary. In this fictive autobiography, Mendelsohn imagines the fate of America’s most famous missing person. Stranded on an island with her navigator, the putative Earhart reflects on her life, her marriage to Putnam and the pressures surrounding the final flights. The prose is sensuous and lyrical: They flew ‘like fugitive angels,’ she writes, and ‘spent our days feverish from the flaming sun or lost in the artillery of monsoon rains and almost always astonished by the unearthly architecture of the sky.’  

Highway of Tears: A True Story of Racism, Indifference and the Pursuit of Justice for Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls by Jessica McDiarmid

The ‘Highway of Tears’, Canada’s Highway 16 in British Columbia, is a 725km stretch of road known for the number of missing and murdered indigenous women. Journalist Jessica McDiarmid who grew up near the Highway spent several years interviewing families of victims and researching the cases, the investigations and media coverage – particularly highlight the disparate responses when victims were white rather than indigenous. Focusing on the lives of the girls and women before they disappeared and the experiences of their families in the aftermath of their disappearances or deaths, McDiarmid highlights a larger problem of systemic racism, indifference and victim blaming. 

The Last Stone by Mark Bowden

In 1975 Mark Bowden author of Black Hawk Down was a cub reporter for a paper in Baltimore Maryland when two sisters Katherine (10) and Shelia (12) Lyons disappeared from a shopping mall outside Washington DC. He reported on it for two weeks but there were no answers and for almost forty years the case was cold. In 2013 an investigator came across a statement given by a Lloyd Welch (18 years old). Welch had gone to police to say he’d seen the girls being forced into a car by a middle-aged man in a suit but failed a polygraph. The investigator noted that a mug shot picture of Welch from 1977 resembled the police sketch of a suspect at the mall. The Last Stone focuses on the extended interrogation sessions with detectives in which Welch fabricates and lies but ultimately confesses. Gripping and a tribute to the tenacity of the detectives who literally turned every last stone.

The Cold Vanish: Seeking the Missing in North America’s Wildlands by Jon Billman

Early one spring morning Jacob Gray stepped off his bike in the northern district of Olympic National Park in Washington state. It is not clear why. Four arrows are found stuck in the ground between his bike and the road. The details become ciphers, like secret communications from the missing. The Cold Vanish focuses not so much on those who have disappeared in the North American wilderness but those who go looking for them.

On Chapel Sands: My Mother and Other Missing Persons by Laura Cumming

This memoir about the mystery of Cumming’s mother’s identity and her abduction when she was three years old is beautifully descriptive yet reads almost like a thriller as the past unspools. With her mother, Cumming sifts through objects, photographs, police reports, and shadows of memories as they piece together the story of the missing persons in her mother’s life and her missing past. She quotes St Augustine: ‘The dead may be invisible, but they are not absent.’ A stunning reflection on how we forget, remember and love, even those who were missing all our lives. 

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