Leonarde(tm)s voices form some of the most powerful and beautiful language Ie(tm)ve read in quite a while. Her new novel, When She Was Gone, reflects a perfect balance of darkness and intricate struggles, woven together with hope and redemption. I loved, loved, loved this novel.', eoeGwendolen Gross creates characters so familiar they could live next door. A haunting exploration of love, loyalty, sisters, hope, and the ties that bind us togethere'and make the ground tremble beneath us when they break. Full of heart but free of sentimentality, When She Was Gone shows the sinews of belonging and not-belonging that bind a community., 'Breathtakingly original. Gross deftly depicts the dread-filled unfolding of a mother's realization that her child is missing and clearly portrays how a crisis of this nature unearths alliances and fissures within a community., What happens behind the closed doors of a neighborhood, and beyond the facades of the people who live there? Gwendolen Gross has the sharp insight of a documentarian, turning her lens on each house of a frightened town after a college-bound girl goes missing. Similar in title and theme to Gillian Flynn's Gone Girl, Gross's fifth novel feels more genuine in that her characters are less contrived. This luminous new novel by the acclaimed author of The Orphan Sister explores coming of age in the shadows of a suburban life, and what is revealed when the light suddenly shines in.

As the days of Linsey's absence tick by, dread and hope threaten to tear a community apart. Leonard, the quiet, retired piano teacher with insomnia, who saw Linsey leave Reeva, the queen bee of a clique of mothers, now obsessed with a secret interest Timmy, Linsey's lovelorn ex-boyfriend and George, an eleven-year-old loner who is determined to find out what happened to his missing neighbor. There's Linsey's mother, Abigail, whose door-to-door searching makes her social-outcast status painfully obvious Mr. Linsey's neighbors are just ordinary people-but even ordinary people can keep terrible secrets hidden close. W hat happened to Linsey Hart? When the Cornell-bound teenager disappears into the steamy blue of a late-summer morning, her quiet neighborhood is left to pick apart the threads of their own lives and assumptions. Tom Perotta's Little Children meets Alice Sebold's The Lovely Bones in this suspenseful and beautifully wrought story of a seventeen-year-old girl who vanishes on the eve of her departure for college, as told through the alternating perspectives of her neighbors.

The she was gone book