When She Was Gone

When She Was Gone

<B>Tom Perotta’s <I>Little Children </I>meets Alice Sebold’s <I>The Lovely Bones </I>in this suspenseful and beautifully wrought story of a seventeen-year-old girl who vanishes on the eve of her departure for college, as told through the alternating perspectives of her neighbors.</B><BR><BR><B><I>W</I></B><B><I>hat happened to Linsey Hart? </I></B>When the Cornell-bound teenager disappears into the steamy blue of a late-summer morning, her quiet neighborhood is left to pick apart the threads of their own lives and assumptions. <BR><BR>Linsey’s neighbors are just ordinary people—but even ordinary people can keep terrible secrets hidden close. There’s Linsey’s mother, Abigail, whose door-to-door searching makes her social-outcast status painfully obvious; Mr. Leonard, the quiet, retired piano teacher with insomnia, who saw Linsey leave; Reeva, the queen bee of a clique of mothers, now obsessed with a secret interest; Timmy, Linsey’s lovelorn ex-boyfriend; and George, an eleven-year-old loner who is determined to find out what happened to his missing neighbor. <BR><BR>As the days of Linsey’s absence tick by, dread and hope threaten to tear a community apart. This luminous new novel by the acclaimed author of <I>The Orphan Sister </I>explores coming of age in the shadows of a suburban life, and what is revealed when the light suddenly shines in. . . .