Notes on Your Sudden Disappearance

From Alison Espach, author of the New York Times Editor’s Choice novel The Adults, comes a dazzlingly unconventional love story for readers of Ask Again, Yes and Tell the Wolves I’m Home

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.

A Macmillan Audio production from Henry Holt & Company.