Elizabeth Is Missing

Maud is eighty-two and her memory is failing. She writes herself notes so she will not forget, but the notes pile up faster than she can make sense of them, and the present slips away almost as soon as it happens. One thing, however, she is certain of: her friend Elizabeth is missing, and something terrible has happened to her. No one will listen, least of all her exhausted daughter, so Maud sets out to investigate on her own.

As she searches, the mystery of Elizabeth's disappearance becomes tangled with a far older one. Seventy years earlier, just after the war, Maud's beloved older sister Sukey vanished without a trace, a loss that was never explained. The two disappearances begin to blur together in Maud's fracturing mind.

Emma Healey's acclaimed debut is a mystery told from inside the confusion of dementia, at once a gripping puzzle and a tender, heartbreaking portrait of memory, aging, and the enduring bonds of family.