Elizabeth Is Missing by British author Emma Healey was published in 2014 and tells the story of Maud Horsham, an old woman suffering from dementia. Maud’s older sister, Sukey, disappeared in the 1940s. Seventy years later, this tragic event continues to haunt Maud, who now thinks her best friend Elizabeth is missing. Maud is desperate to figure out what happened to Sukey and Elizabeth before she loses her ability to piece together the clues.Maud’s daughter, Helen, and a paid caregiver, Carla, care for Maud. They warn Maud not to leave the house, to stop buying tinned peaches, and not to turn on the stove. Maud either ignores or forgets each of these rules.Determined to find out what’s happened to her friend Elizabeth, Maud visits the police station multiple times, places a missing persons ad in the local paper, and repeatedly visits Elizabeth’s house looking for clues. Maud’s inability to retain information makes it difficult for her to piece together the information she learns. Maud keeps scraps of paper in her pockets to track the clues; her jumbled and incomplete notes mirror her mental state.

1996 was the year that changed everything for Maggie Dawes. Sent away at sixteen to live with an aunt she barely knew in Ocracoke, a remote village on North Carolina’s Outer Banks, she could think only of the friends and family she left behind . . . until she met Bryce Trickett, one of the few teenagers on the island. Handsome, genuine, and newly admitted to West Point, Bryce showed her how much there was to love about the wind-swept beach town—and introduced her to photography, a passion that would define the rest of her life.By 2019, Maggie is a renowned travel photographer. She splits her time between running a successful gallery in New York and photographing remote locations around the world. But this year she is unexpectedly grounded over Christmas, struggling to come to terms with a sobering medical diagnosis. Increasingly dependent on a young assistant, she finds herself becoming close to him.As they count down the last days of the season together, she begins to tell him the story of another Christmas, decades earlier—and the love that set her on a course she never could have imagined.

Charlie Redmond and Maurice Hearne are Cork drug dealers, former big-time suppliers and users. Now into their 50s, their black money is squandered; they have done and could still do terrible things. “The years are rolling out like tide now. There is old weather on their faces, on the hard lines of their jaws, on their chaotic mouths. But they retain – just about – a rakish air.”It’s October 2018, and Charlie and Maurice find themselves keeping vigil at the Algeciras ferry terminal in southern Spain, where the night boats to Tangier depart and dock. This place has the clear contours of purgatory, perhaps one that Charlie and Maurice deserve. It is a Hades crossing point, a portal to dread.

Russell’s novel moves between present and past. The novel is divided into seventeen chapters, each defined by years in Vanessa Wye’s life before, during, and after her affair with her prep school English teacher. Nine of the chapters take place in 2017, the rest move forward from 2000, the year Vanessa arrives for her sophomore year at Browick Prep School. Wye serves as the first-person narrator.The novel begins in 2017. Thirty-something Vanessa is a concierge at a posh resort hotel in Portland, Maine. The job is dead-end for a woman who, as a promising student decades earlier, once harbored dreams of being a great poet. Still reeling from the recent death of her father, she drifts through her days now, uncertain over her future, unwilling or unable to confront the ghosts of her past, specifically the trauma of an affair she had with an English teacher, Jacob Strane, that began when she in prep school. An email contact from a journalist asks Vanessa to come forward with her story about her experience with Strane. Strane, now approaching sixty, in the culture engendered by the MeToo