Elizabeth Is Missing

Description

By (author) Healey, Emma; By (author) Healey, Emma

Short /annotation
Meet Maud. Maud is forgetful. She makes a cup of tea and doesn”t remember to drink it. She goes to the shops and forgets why she went. Sometimes her home is unrecognizable – or her daughter Helen seems a total stranger. But there”s one thing Maud is sure of: her friend Elizabeth is missing. The note in her pocket tells her so.

NOW A MAJOR BBC DRAMA
A SUNDAY TIMES TOP FIVE BESTSELLER

How do you solve a mystery when you can”t remember the clues?

Maud is forgetful. She makes a cup of tea and doesn”t remember to drink it. She goes to the shops and forgets why she went. Sometimes her home is unrecognizable – or her daughter Helen seems a total stranger.

But there”s one thing Maud is sure of: her friend Elizabeth is missing. The note in her pocket tells her so. And no matter who tells her to stop going on about it, to leave it alone, to shut up, Maud will get to the bottom of it.

Because somewhere in Maud”s damaged mind lies the answer to an unsolved seventy-year-old mystery. One everyone has forgotten about.

Everyone, except Maud . . .

Winner of the Costa First Novel Award
Shortlisted for National Book Awards Popular Fiction Book
Shortlisted for National Book Awards New Writer of the Year

Longlisted for the Women”s Prize for Fiction

”A thrillingly assured, haunting and unsettling novel, I read it at a gulp”
Deborah Moggach, author of The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel

”Elizabeth Is Missing will stir and shake you: the most likeably unreliable of narrators, real mystery at its compassionate core…”
Emma Donoghue, author of Room

”Resembling a version of Memento written by Alan Bennett”
Daily Telegraph

”One of those mythical beasts, the book you cannot put down”
Jonathan Coe, author of The Rotters Club

”Every bit as compelling as the frenzied hype suggests. Gripping, haunting”
Observer

Review quote
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 … perhaps Healey”s greatest achievement is the flawless voice she creates for Maud.

Review quote
A compelling mystery that capture the experience of Maud, a highly memorable elderly woman losing her memory

Review quote
Riveting psychological thriller

Review quote
A thrillingly assured, haunting and unsettling novel, I read it at a gulp

Biographical note
Emma Healey, a former bookseller, grew up in London where she went to art college and completed her first degree in bookbinding. She then worked for two libraries, two bookshops, two art galleries and two universities, and was busily pursuing a career in the art world before writing overtook everything. She moved to Norwich in 2010 to study for the MA in Creative Writing at UEA and never moved back again. Elizabeth is Missing, her first novel, was a Sunday Times Bestseller, won the Costa First Novel Award 2014 and was shortlisted for the National Book Awards Popular Fiction Book of the Year.