Happiness Falls

The family does not call the police right away. Mia is twenty, irreverent and analytical, and she has a reasonable explanation for every delay.

Her father and her younger brother Eugene have gone for a walk in a park near their home in Virginia, and they have not come back. A lost phone, perhaps, or an errand along the way.

Then Eugene comes through the front door alone and bloody. Their father is missing, and Eugene is the only person who saw what happened. He has Angelman syndrome, a rare genetic condition, and he cannot speak.

The novel centers on a close biracial Korean-American family whose father has vanished. Mia's habit of explaining everything is tested by a disappearance that no theory yet accounts for.

It reads as a family mystery set inside the household, where the question of what Eugene witnessed sits at the center and the person who knows the most has no words to say it.