When I began compiling stories for my collection, I noted the theme of disappearance throughout. Iām not sure why thatās the case. Perhaps because Iāve dealt with disappearance on a personal level. Perhaps almost all stories deal with the theme. I have also always been fascinated by people who disappear (such as Agatha Christie), especially into the wild. As a former book editor, my reading standards are very high. The books Iāve recommended are superb and still resonate with me years after Iāve read them. I hope you explore this list and that the characters in these unique and well-crafted stories linger on, even after youāve finished the last page.
This evocative historical novel, set in 1903 in the Western Canadian wilderness, is one of my favorite novels. Mary Boulton, newly made a widow by her own hand, flees her vengeful brothers-in-law. This is the story of the hunted, and the ability of a woman to disappear as needed into the vast wild and survive on her own. A soft thriller, with lyrical prose. And one of the most memorable characters Iāve come across in this genre.
On a moonlit night in 1903, a mysterious young woman flees alone across the Canadian wilderness, one quick step ahead of her pursuers. Mary Boulton is nineteen years old, half mad, and widowed - by her own hand. Tearing through the forest with dogs howling in the distance, she is desperate, her nerves burning, and she is certain of one thing only - that her every move is being traced. Two red-headed brothers, rifles across their backs, lurch close behind her: monstrous figures, identical in every way, with the predatory look of hyenas. She has murdered their brother, and theirā¦
This brief novel in stories was a pleasant surprise. I was completely drawn into the dry, unfamiliar landscape of the Australian Blue Mountains and loved that while the narrator is a young man coming to terms with his personal history, the theme of the book is the impact that the disappearance of both his grandmother and mother have on him as a boy and as a man trying to find himself in a relationship. Pierce deftly weaves in found memoirs and retrieved memories to create a bigger picture of life: how we both develop and lose ourselves, how place affects us, and how our actions can have a major impact on others.
Haunted by the deaths of his mother and grandmother, both of whom perished while hiking through Australiaās Blue Mountains, Sam Browne returns to the country of his motherās birth in search of his familyās history and a way to make a place for himself within it. By reading his grandmotherās memoirs, Sam begins to connect to his familyās ancestral home and understand the reasons that she and her daughter after her were so drawn to the Australian landscape and the mystery found there.
Before the Revolution is the first book in The Kindred Spirit series, which revisits historic events through the eyes of two adolescent boys, Nathaniel Dodge and Cody Stevens, who witness events as they happen.
Cody was 13 when he died in an accident in the stable at his home. Whenā¦
Daisy Johnson is a force of her own. Iāve read all three of her books and was the most taken with her more recent novel, Sisters. This has a moody, gothic feel to it. Very well narrated by one of the two sisters, and is the ultimate story about disappearance, and the traumatic effect it can have on a loved one. Brutal, surreal, and with a setting as real as its characters: a crumbling moldy cottage, near the shore, that lives and breathes with the characters. And includes a twist you wonāt see coming.
The electrifying novel from the Booker shortlisted author of Everything Under.
'A short sharp explosion of a gothic thriller' Observer
Something unspeakable has happened to sisters July and September.
Desperate for a fresh start, they move across the country to an old family house that has a troubled life of its own. Noises come from behind the walls. Lights flicker of their own accord. Sleep feels impossible, dreams are endless.
In their new, unsettling surroundings, July finds that the fierce bond she's always had with September - forged with a blood promise when they were children - is beginning toā¦
One of my working titles for my book was A Country All Its Own, a phrase pulled from this exquisite novel set in Hilo, Hawaii. Ball plays with the theme of disappearance throughout, and itās basically the female version of Australia Stories. Kinau, the narrator, is also shaped by her motherās stories and haunted by the disappearance of her father, and the death of her ex-husband's stepson, who comes to the island in search of his own destiny. Original and breathtaking in its craft and message, Ball is an accomplished storyteller.
A haunting tale of obsessive love, and how an otherwise strong young woman releases herself from it. What if you lived in a world where you could wake the dead, where men had a shark jaw buried in their backs just as the shark god did when he stepped on the shore and became human? A place where scalding lava ran through the streets of the town and down into the hissing sea. Where women picked up guns and never put them down again, where it rained three days out of three, and ghosts drank from the rain gutters andā¦
In the bigoted milieu of 1945, six days after the official end of World War II, Bess Myerson, the daughter of poor Russian immigrants living in the Bronx, remarkably rises to become Miss America, the first āand to date onlyā Jewish woman to do so. At stake is a $5,000ā¦
My mother gifted me this book after the death of my father, which was a gut-wrenching event for the entire family and which mirrored Kalanithiās ending. Itās the only nonfiction book on my list, but a very important one. Death is the ultimate disappearance, is it not? And something we all have to come to terms with in myriad ways. This book helps prepare us for the death of others and for our own final disappearance.
'Rattling. Heartbreaking. Beautiful.' Atul Gawande, bestselling author of Being Mortal
What makes life worth living in the face of death?
At the age of thirty-six, on the verge of completing a decade's training as a neurosurgeon, Paul Kalanithi was diagnosed with inoperable lung cancer. One day he was a doctor treating the dying, the next he was a patient struggling to live.
When Breath Becomes Air chronicles Kalanithi's transformation from a medical student asking what makes a virtuous and meaningful life into a neurosurgeon working in the core of human identity - the brain - andā¦
In How We Disappear, award-winning author Tara Lynn Masih offers readers transporting and compelling stories of those taken, those missing, and those neither here nor gone-runaways, exiles, wanderers, ghosts, even the elusive Dame Agatha Christie. From the remote Siberian taiga to the harsh American frontier, from rural Long Island to postwar Belgium, Masih's characters are diverse in identity and circumstance, defying the burden of erasure by disappearing into or emerging from physical and emotional landscapes.
Described as "masterful" and as "striking and resonant" by Publishers Weekly, Masih's fiction, crossing boundaries between historical and contemporary, sparks with awareness that nothing and no one is ever gone for goodāand that the wilderness is never quite behind us.
Creativity, Teaching, and Natural Inspiration
by
Mark Doherty,
I have woven numerous delightful and descriptive true life stories, many from my adventures as an outdoorsman and singer songwriter, into my life as a high school English teacher. I think you'll find this work both entertaining as well as informative, and I hope you enjoy the often lighthearted reparteeā¦
The dragons of Yuro have been hunted to extinction.
On a small, isolated island, in a reclusive forest, lives bandit leader Marani and her brother Jacks. With their outlaw band, they rob the rich to feed themselves, raiding carriages and dodging the occasional vindictive pegasus. Thanks to Maraniās mysterious invulnerability,ā¦