"The premise begins simply enough: Elyria has unexpectedly left her husband. And yet the proceeding narrative introduces some of contemporary fiction's most complex personal introspection as Catherine Lacey--with the ease of a master--depicts a mind that may, or may not, be breaking down . . . Elyria hitchhikes, meets a handful of characters and thinks. And her ponderings--written in Lacey's consistently remarkable, urgent prose style--slowly unravel the layers of Elyria's discontent, revealing an expanse of universal anxiety and uncertainty. Her observations of the country and her ruminations on the past are simultaneously childlike in their wonder and astounding in their depth. Page after page, the novel strikes those rarely accomplished balances between action and interiority, comedy and bleakness, stream-of-consciousness and clarity. An uncomplicated plot written with honesty and linguistic deftness characterizes many of the world's great novels, including this debut. As the story concludes, Lacey does not assert any sense of closure because there are no lessons here, only a stunning portrait of, to paraphrase Doris Lessing, a woman going mad all by herself." --Tiffany Gibert, "Time Out New York""Catherine Lacey's virtuosic debut is a gutsy, lyric meditation on identity, love, transformation, and what it means to be free. It is a breathtakingly accomplished novel, and Catherine Lacey is a riveting new voice in contemporary fiction." --Laura van den Berg, author of "The Isle""of Youth""A dense, subtle series of meditations on domestication, estrangement, wildness, and above all, loss and absence." --David Shields, author of "How Literature Saved My Life" and coauthor of" Salinger""Catherine Lacey has a magic voice like none I've ever read before. An unknown cousin of both David Markson's "Wittgenstein's Mistress "and Marilynne Robinson's "Housekeeping," "Nobody Is Ever""Missing "is a fabulously intelligent and witty book, and also a very moving one." --R

Catherine Lacey is the recipient of a 2012 New York Foundation for the Arts Artists' Fellowship in Fiction Writing. She has published stories and nonfiction in "McSweeney's," "Believer," " The Atlantic," " 52 Stories," ""and "The Paris Review." In 2010 she cofounded 3B, a cooperative bed and breakfast in Brooklyn, New York. She earned an MFA in creative nonfiction from Columbia University and a BA from Loyola University in New Orleans.