Sarah Leipciger returns to her native Canada for her third novel, the story of a missing girl and her parents who receive news decades after she disappeared.
Yannick has remarried several times since Una went missing, fathering another four children; Kathleen has remained alone, intent on finding her daughter and growing ever more irascible. On the eve of the annual party she hosts to raise awareness of Una, Yannick and Kathleen meet to discuss the news they’ve both received. He persuades her to travel with him to Vancouver where Una had been living to talk to the police. Their journey is slow and difficult, hampered by age and health problems, but by the time they return to their separate lives, each of them has come to some sort of peace both with each other and with themselves.
Although we discover what happened to Una, Leipciger's novel is about her parents rather than her, portraying the upending of their lives by a loss that has never been resolved with a touching compassion and tenderness. Kathleen’s single-minded pursuit of information about Una has left her isolated and insensitive, lost in a grief for her daughter which is not the same as the grief of a bereaved mother. Yannick’s sadness has been buried in his successive families, slowly surfacing as he and Kathleen drive across the country not knowing what they might find. Leipciger's writing is as striking as I remembered from her previous novels, glorious descriptions of the natural world shining out from elegantly pared back prose. A novel to savour and return to.