Notes on Your Sudden Disappearance

From Alison Espach,author of the New York Times Editor’s Choice novel The Adultscomes a dazzlingly unconventional love story for readers of Ask AgainYes and Tell the Wolves I’m Home. The summer before Sally Holt starts the eighth grade begins as a gloriously uneventful one. It’s full of family trips to the beach and long afternoons at the local pool with her older sister Kathywhich they mostly use as an excuse to ogle Billy Barneswho works the concession stand there. A rising senior and local basketball starBilly has been an unending source of intrigue for both girls since he jumped off the school roof in fifth gradeand 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 yearsNotes on Your Sudden Disappearance is narrated by Sally as she addresses Kathy beforeduringand after her 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 connectionsNotes on Your Sudden Disappearance is both a breathtaking love story between two broken people who are unexplainablyinconveniently drawn to each otherand a wrysharply 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.