Nora Lindell has disappeared. It's Halloween night in prosperous, Mid-Atlantic town, and Nora Lindell, apple of everyone's eye, is missing. As friends and classmates are informed of this sudden disappearance, and as the days and soon the months pile up, the mystery lingers, even grows.As the years accrete, rumours and theories of her fate collide with conflicting eyewitness accounts, running up against divergent suspicions, projections and wishful-thinking, regularly reignited by swear-to-God glimpses of her, and the speculations and fantasies they inspire. The choral narrator that guides us through the novel describes not only the individual and collective perspective ofNora's forlorn peers, but also tracks the emotional and dramatic future of the family she has left behind, the households that surrounded them, and the individual fates of all those boys in her thrall. As this chorus filters background information and possible motivation, Nora's life story is unexpectedly unfurled, and her enduring role in the boys' emotional lives is filled out.They become aware of her significance in ways neither they nor we could have anticipated.They variously miss, fetishise and revere Nora Lindell - or at least what she has come to mean, come to be.

In haunted, metronomic prose, Hannah Pittard commands and holds our attention completely.And she does it with an ingeniously traced, brilliantly wielded speculative wonder, threading its attention through a multitude of lives, through their many phases, tragedies and devotions, even as it lays out the possibilities of Nora's putative end, or her imagined other lives.