Notes on Your Sudden Disappearance

A Novel

by Alison Espach

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Pub Date May 17 2022 | Archive Date May 16 2023

Henry Holt & Company | Henry Holt and Co.

General Fiction (Adult) | Literary Fiction

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Description

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 eighth 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.

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...

Advance Praise

“Oh how I loved this novel! Alison Espach masterfully examines the effects of devastating loss with enormous wit, charm, and intelligence. Though I was reminded at times of Alice Sebold's The Lovely Bones and the dark fictions of Megan Abbott, this is truly a novel like no other.” —Joanna Rakoff, author of My Salinger Year

“Espach is an immensely talented writer, and her prose unfolds with a devastating lightness of touch. This novel is deeply moving, always excellent, and often unexpectedly funny.” —Emily St. John Mandel, New York Times bestselling author of The Glass Hotel

“In Alison Espach's hands a teenage girl on the cusp of understanding, her dazzling older sister, the small Connecticut town they live in become a beautifully described world filled with characters I wanted to meet, characters I still think about. Their trials and tribulations and adolescent longing and awkwardness; their love for each other. Notes on Your Sudden Disappearance is the rare kind of book that made me both laugh and cry. It is hilarious and moving and deeply felt, and I was sad when it ended.” —Anton DiSclafani, author of The Yonahlossee Riding Camp for Girls and The After Party

“It’s difficult to cut through the overinflated language of blurbs to convey the genuine specialness and beauty of Notes on Your Sudden Disappearance. Writing from a black hole, ‘soundless and windless and without gravity,’ Alison Espach has alchemized unimaginable tragedy into a story that’s deceptively funny, tender, and ultimately life-affirming. Novels like this are what the art form is for.” —Teddy Wayne, author of Apartment