NOW A MAJOR BBC DRAMA
A SUNDAY TIMES TOP FIVE BESTSELLER
How do you solve a mystery when you can't remember the clues?
Maud is forgetful. She makes a cup of tea and doesn't remember to drink it. She goes to the shops and forgets why she went. Sometimes her home is unrecognizable - or her daughter Helen seems a total stranger.
But there's one thing Maud is sure of: her friend Elizabeth is missing. The note in her pocket tells her so. And no matter who tells her to stop going on about it, to leave it alone, to shut up, Maud will get to the bottom of it.
Because somewhere in Maud's damaged mind lies the answer to an unsolved seventy-year-old mystery. One everyone has forgotten about.
Everyone, except Maud . . .
Winner of the Costa First Novel Award
Shortlisted for National Book Awards Popular Fiction Book
Shortlisted for National Book Awards New Writer of the Year
Longlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize
Longlisted for the Baileys Prize for Women's Fiction
'A thrillingly assured, haunting and unsettling novel, I read it at a gulp' Deborah Moggach, author of The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel
'Elizabeth Is Missing will stir and shake you: the most likeably unreliable of narrators, real mystery at its compassionate core...' Emma Donoghue, author of Room
'Resembling a version of Memento written by Alan Bennett' Daily Telegraph
'One of those mythical beasts, the book you cannot put down' Jonathan Coe, author of The Rotters Club
'Every bit as compelling as the frenzied hype suggests. Gripping, haunting' Observer
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Imprint: Penguin
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Published: 05/06/2014
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ISBN: 9780241968192
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Length: 304 Pages
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RRP: £8.99
Reviews
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The novel is both a gripping detective yarn and a haunting depiction of mental illness, but also more poignant and blackly comic than you might expect from that description... perhaps Healey's greatest achievement is the flawless voice she creates for Maud.
The Observer
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A compelling mystery that capture the experience of Maud, a highly memorable elderly woman losing her memory
Sunday Express
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A thrillingly assured, haunting and unsettling novel, I read it at a gulp
Deborah Moggach
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One of those semi-mythical beasts, the book you cannot put down
Jonathan Coe
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Already being tipped for literary stardom. At the London Book Fair last April, nine publishers fought for her debut, Elizabeth is Missing... a tale of dementia, its TV rights have already been sold
Evening Standard's Fourteen in 2014
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Memory - or the lack of it - continues to be a big theme in fiction. The manuscript of this debut mystery narrated by an 81 year old who can't quite remember what she's investigating created a buzz at the London book fair in 2013
Guardian's 2014 Books
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Elizabeth is Missing will stir and shake you: an investigation into a seventy-year-old crime, through the eyes of the most likeably unreliable of narrators. But the real mystery at its compassionate core is the fragmentation of the human mind.
Emma Donoghue, award-winning author of Room
