Call the Canaries Home

Savannah was four when her twin, Georgia, disappeared from their small Louisiana town. Twenty-eight years later she talks her estranged older sisters, Rayanne and Sue Ellen, into honouring the pact they made as children: come home, and dig up the time capsule buried in the backyard.

Coming home means their grandmother Meemaw, the house, and everything the three of them left behind. Sorting through the contents, they find a photograph taken the day Georgia went missing, with a woman they half-recognise standing in the background. Rayanne and Sue Ellen want to close the box and go. Savannah wants to find her.

Laura Barrow's debut is women's fiction with a missing-child mystery at its centre — more about what grief does to a family over three decades than about the investigation, and generous to all three sisters in turn.