NOTES ON YOUR SUDDEN DISAPPEARANCE

NOTES ON YOUR SUDDEN DISAPPEARANCE is a tender, funny coming of age tale. It's also a wrenching but delicately handled depiction of loss. And, ultimately, it's a moving and unconventional love story. This altogether mesmerizing novel is narrated by Sally, our young heroine, who addresses the book to Kathy, her beloved and impossibly cool older sister. Beginning just after Sally's thirteenth birthday, the book spans fifteen years--the fault line of which is Kathy's untimely death. As the years go by, Sally searches for who she is inside and outside of her fundamentally changed family, while weathering the twists and turns of a complex and long-simmering love affair. A deeply humane, compulsively readable novel for literary and upmarket literary lists, this will appeal to fans of Ask Again, Yes by Mary Beth Keane and the work of Celeste Ng.

The summer before Sally Holt starts the 8th grade begins as a gloriously uneventful one, full of family trips to the beach and long afternoons at the local pool with her older sister Kathy, which they mostly use as an excuse to ogle Billy Barnes, who works the concession stand there. A rising senior and local basketball star, Billy has been an unending source of intrigue for both girls since he jumped off the school roof in fifth grade, and their fascination with him is one of the few things the increasingly different sisters have in common. By summer's end Billy and Kathy are an item—an unthinkable stroke of luck that ends in an even more unthinkable tragedy.

Set over the course of fifteen years, NOTES ON YOUR SUDDEN DISAPPEARANCE is narrated by Sally as she addresses Kathy before, during and after Kathy's death. We watch as Kathy's absence creates a gaping hole that only Billy—now firmly off limits to Sally—understands and might possibly begin to fill. Charting years of their shared history and missed connections, NOTES is both a breathtaking love story between two broken people who are unexplainably, inconveniently drawn to each other, and a wry, sharply observant coming of age story that looks at the ways the people we love the most continue to shape our lives long after they're gone.

Alison Espach is the author of the novel The Adults, a New York Times' Editor's Choice and a Barnes and Noble Discover pick. Her short story series In-Depth Market Research Interviews with Dead People is an Audible Original and her work has appeared in McSweeney's, Vogue, Joyland, Glamour, Salon, among other places. She teaches creative writing at Providence College in Rhode Island.