Top 10 books about missing persons

Una Mannion’s debut novel is A Crooked Tree.

Her new novel, Tell Me What I Am, is due out in the US in August 2023.

At the Guardian Mannion tagged ten books about missing persons -- "interrupted stories, in fiction and real life, [that] are powerfully moving and key into a universal anxiety." One title on the list:

Then She Was Gone by Lisa Jewell

Jewell’s psychological thriller moves between timelines and narrators to create a complex and disturbing story about a missing girl. Ellie Mack disappears just weeks before her GSCEs. Her mother Laurel can’t get past her “raw need to keep the search going” and, a decade later, finds herself completely alone, her husband and other children living their own lives elsewhere. Then Laurel meets a man whose nine-year-old daughter bears an uncanny resemblance to Ellie. The tension is intensified by Jewell’s use of multiple narrators, two of whom narrate in the first person and know something about Ellie’s disappearance.

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue