A new Alison Moore novel always promises to be splendidly unsettling, and Missing is no exception. Moore’s protagonist is Jessie Noon, a translator living in the Scottish Borders. Jessie’s job may be about finding the right words in order to make a connection between writer and reader, but her life is full of gaps and ambiguities. Her son walked out on her years ago, her second husband much more recently. Her cottage might be haunted, and a plot strand set in 1985 suggests that something tragic happened then between the teenage Jessie and her young niece.
Missing is full of everyday minutiae: supermarket shopping, train travel, a halting relationship between Jessie and a local outreach worker. But there’s a constant undercurrent of tension and uncertainty: you can never be quite sure how each individual element will resolve. As a result, reading Moore’s novel feels like being on a knife-edge.
Book details
Missing (2018) by Alison Moore, Salt Publishing, 184 pages, paperback (source: review copy).
27th June 2018 at 10:04 pm
Is there a trend of books about missing people? We had Reservoir 13 last year. Missing Fay by Adam Thorpe this year which is getting rave reviews and now Missing…..
16th August 2018 at 8:47 pm
Hmm, that’s a thought… Interesting, too, that Missing and Reservoir 13 are so different from each other despite this (can’t comment on the Thorpe as I haven’t read it).
28th June 2018 at 10:51 am
Good point by Booker there.
Alison Moore, I do recognise the name. What else have you read by her?
Of course, I have her The Lighthouse but haven’t read it yet.
16th August 2018 at 8:54 pm
I’ve read quite a bit by her: two short stories, and the novels The Lighthouse and Death and the Seaside. I’m finding it tricky to post links in comments, but this should take you to the rest of my reviews:
http://www.davidsbookworld.com/category/authors/moore-alison/
She’s also one of the Eden Book Society authors.