A missing person is a story that doesn’t end. We grapple to make sense, to decipher, to make meaning out of something so unfathomable. Jon Billman refers to the “purgatorial underworld of the vanished”, a description that makes great sense to me. The missing are caught in an in-between place, not here but not gone. Stories about missing persons respond to this cultural anxiety, their narratives plotting explanations or recovering and remembering the absent souls, refusing their oblivion.
In my novel Tell Me What I Am a woman goes missing, leaving behind her sister and her four-year-old daughter. They alternately narrate the story of what happened and, I like to think, together engage in act of recovery.
1. On Chapel Sands: My Mother and Other Missing Persons by Laura Cumming
This memoir about the mystery of Cumming’s mother’s identity and her abduction when she was three years old is beautifully descriptive yet reads almost like a thriller as the past unspools. With her mother, Cumming sifts through objects, photographs, police reports, and shadows of memories as they piece together the story of the missing persons in her mother’s life and her missing past. She quotes St Augustine: “The dead may be invisible, but they are not absent.” A stunning reflection on how we forget, remember and love, even those who have been missing all our lives.
2. Songs for the Missing by Stewart O’Nan
In the summer of 2005, 18-year-old Kim Larsen vanishes on her way to work. Her Chevette is found several days later in a nearby town. O’Nan resists generic expectations, sidelining the thriller elements to offer a compassionate portrait of a family afraid to give up in the face of tragedy. Narrated alternately by Kim’s mother, father and 15-year-old sister, O’Nan shows us a different kind of procedural: endless waiting, spending nights on websites as her sister does, or taking pills to fall into unconsciousness like her mother. Perhaps the most devastating character is the father, desperately driving up and down highways distributing flyers, trying to keep his daughter in the public mind.
3. Nox by Anne Carson
Carson’s brother Michael disappeared in 1978 to escape imprisonment and for two decades wandered, making minimal contact with his family before his death in 2000. Nox is an elegy, an experimental poem narrating his story through ephemera – scribbled notes, photographs, sketches, fragments of phone conversations all stapled in, glued on, copied. This handmade, tactile book felled me, showing how words can resist oblivion and forgetting. “A brother never ends,” she writes.
4. Falling Animals by Sheila Armstrong
Armstrong’s debut novel draws on the real case of an unidentified person in the north-west of Ireland. In 2009, “Peter Bergmann” was found washed up on the shore after spending several days in Sligo town cutting labels from his clothes and discarding his belongings in various bins. The mystery of this person who tried to disappear has not been solved but Armstrong distils the event into a meditation on loss and community through a chorus of voices. Elegiac and profoundly beautiful.
5. Then She Was Gone by Lisa Jewell
Jewell’s psychological thriller moves between timelines and narrators to create a complex and disturbing story about a missing girl. Ellie Mack disappears just weeks before her GSCEs. Her mother Laurel can’t get past her “raw need to keep the search going” and, a decade later, finds herself completely alone, her husband and other children living their own lives elsewhere. Then Laurel meets a man whose nine-year-old daughter bears an uncanny resemblance to Ellie. The tension is intensified by Jewell’s use of multiple narrators, two of whom narrate in the first person and know something about Ellie’s disappearance.
6. I Was Amelia Earhart by Jane Mendelsohn
Amelia Earhart’s disappearance in 1937 during her attempt to circumnavigate the world is deeply fixed in the public imagination. In this fictive autobiography, Mendelsohn imagines the fate of America’s most famous missing person. Stranded on an island with her navigator, Earhart reflects on her life, her marriage to George Palmer Putnam and the pressures surrounding the final flights. The prose is sensuous and lyrical: they flew “like fugitive angels”, she writes, and “spent our days feverish from the flaming sun or lost in the artillery of monsoon rains and almost always astonished by the unearthly architecture of the sky”.
7. Antígona by José Watanabe
Sophocles’ story about a sister who buries her brother against a state decree has an enduring legacy, particularly in Latin America where the unburied body of a brother and a sister sent out of the world still living seems an apt metaphor for the disappeared in the wake of state violence. Antígona is a verse play written by the Peruvian poet Watanabe in collaboration with Grupo Cultural Yuyachkani and Teresa Ralli in the aftermath of two decades of civil conflict. Ralli interviewed families of the disappeared and was the first to perform the play. The narrator remains unnamed until the end when she symbolically tries to bury her brother: “And these late libations are from my little spirit full with remorse.” It is Ismene, sister of Antigone and Polynices, who has survived. Antígona powerfully resists the efforts of the state narrative to efface Peru’s disappeared and serves as a vehicle for those left behind to forgive themselves.
8. Highway of Tears: A True Story of Racism, Indifference and the Pursuit of Justice for Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls by Jessica McDiarmid
The “Highway of Tears”, Canada’s Highway 16 in British Columbia, is a 725km stretch of road known for the number of missing and murdered Indigenous women. Journalist Jessica McDiarmid – who grew up near the highway, spent several years interviewing families of victims and researching the cases, the investigations and media coverage – highlights the differing responses when victims were white rather than Indigenous. Focusing on the lives of the girls and women before they disappeared, and the experiences of their families in the aftermath of their disappearances or deaths, McDiarmid points up a larger problem of systemic racism, indifference and victim blaming.
9. The Last Stone by Mark Bowden
In 1975 Bowden, author of Black Hawk Down, was a cub reporter for a paper in Baltimore Maryland when two sisters Katherine (10) and Sheila (12) Lyons disappeared from a shopping mall outside Washington DC. He reported on it for two weeks but there were no answers and for almost 40 years the case was cold. In 2013 an investigator came across a statement given by Lloyd Welch (18 years old). Welch had gone to police to say he’d seen the girls being forced into a car by a middle-aged man in a suit but failed a polygraph. The investigator noted that a mugshot of Welch from 1977 resembled the police sketch of a suspect at the mall. The Last Stone focuses on the extended interrogation sessions with detectives in which Welch fabricates and lies but ultimately confesses. Gripping, and a tribute to the tenacity of the detectives who really did turn every last stone.
10. The Cold Vanish: Seeking the Missing in North America’s Wildlands by Jon Billman
Early one spring morning, Jacob Gray stepped off his bike in the northern district of Olympic National Park in Washington state. It is not clear why. Four arrows are found stuck in the ground between his bike and the road. The details become ciphers, like secret communications from the missing. The Cold Vanish focuses not so much on those who have disappeared in the North American wilderness but those who go looking for them.
• Tell Me What I Am by Una Mannion is published by Faber. To help the Guardian and Observer, order your copy from guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
