Catherine Lacey is author of the novels Biography of X, Pew, Nobody Is Ever Missing, and The Answers, as well as the story collection Certain American States. Her honors include a Guggenheim Fellowship, an O Henry Prize, a Cullman Fellowship, and the NYPL Young Lions Fiction Award for 2021. She was named one of Granta Magazine's Best Young American Novelists in 2017 and has recently published work in The New Yorker, Harper's, The New York Times, and Esquire. Her books have been translated into numerous languages.
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Nobody is Ever MissingA Novel
After some time my husband reached over to hold my hand, which reminded me that at least there was this, at least we still had hands that remembered how to love each other, two bone-and-flesh flaps that hadn't complicated their simple love by speaking or thinking or being disappointed or having memories. They just held and were held and that is all. Oh, to be a hand.
Nobody is Ever Missing : A Novel -
Nobody is Ever MissingA Novel
Moments never stay, whether or not you ask them, they do not care, no moment cares, and the ones you wish could stretch out like a hammock for you to lie in, well, those moments leave the quickest and take everything good with them, little burglars, those moments, those hours, those days you loved the most.
Nobody is Ever Missing : A Novel -
Nobody is Ever MissingA Novel
I looked at my mother and felt the jitter and pulse of her life and remembered that I had slipped into this world through her body and how that meant something, how that told me something about the kinds of accidents I was going to make because she was the only start I’d ever get.
Nobody is Ever Missing : A Novel
“Ms. Lacey has written a serious, frequently brilliant novel with a sustained intensity that is rare in fiction. It's the most promising first novel that I've encountered this year.” ―Sam Sacks, The Wall Street Journal [on Nobody Is Ever Missing]
“[A] searching, emotionally resonant first novel…[Lacey's prose is] dreamy and fierce at the same time . . . Ms. Lacey's slim novel impressed me, and held me to my chair. There's significant talent at work here . . . Nobody Is Ever Missing gets so much right that you easily push past its small flaws. It's an aching portrait of a young woman doing the hard thing, "trying to think clearly about mixed feelings.” ―Dwight Garner, The New York Times
“[A] laser smart, affecting, confounding, recalcitrant, infuriating, relentlessly stylish debut novel . . . Using short chapters to stop for breath, Lacey stacks clause upon clause with unerring rhythm, one of those glorious gifts that not everyone's been given and guided by that fabulous inner ear she teases out assonances and upends predictable constructions, modulating her phrases with repetitions, inversions, and tautly-strung wit, the novel propelled by sentences that wind their way inward before springing back out with renewed velocity.” ―Nathan Huffstutter, Electric Literature [on Nobody Is Ever Missing]
Selected Works
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In Catherine Lacey’s accomplished and unsettling novel, Nobody is Ever Missing, a young woman drops out of her life and hitches around New Zealand. There are glimmers of what she’s left behind and an uncertainty about whether she’ll ever find a place to come to rest. Lacey is an intense, lyrical writer who uses the randomness of travel, the brief immersions in the lives of strangers, to reveal the psychology of loss and the dissolution of certainty. The sentences are as adventurous as the protagonist, capable of swerving from the whimsical to the philosophical with exquisite speed. Lacey successfully compels us into what is carefully revealed to be an unraveling mind. A great observer is at work, deft and urgent. It takes a powerful hand to make beautiful writing look so effortless.