A Place Called Here

Sometimes it takes losing everything to truly find yourself... Since Sandy Shortt's childhood classmate disappeared twenty years ago, Sandy has been obsessed with missing things. Finding what is lost becomes her single-minded goal--from the lone sock that vanishes in the washing machine to the car keys she misplaced. It's no surprise, then, that Sandy's life's work becomes finding people who have vanished from their loved ones. Sandy's family is baffled and concerned by her increasing preoccupation. Her parents can't understand her compulsion, and she pushes them away further by losing herself in the work of tracking down these missing people. She gives up her life in order to offer a flicker of hope to devastated families...and escape the disappointments of her own. Jack Ruttle is one of those devastated people. It's been a year since his brother Donal vanished into thin air, and he has enlisted Sandy Shortt to find him. But before she is able to offer Jack the information he so desperately needs, Sandy goes missing too...and Jack now finds himself searching for his brother and the one woman who understood his pain. One minute Sandy is jogging through the park, the next, she can't figure out where she is. The path is obscured. Nothing is familiar. A clearing up ahead reveals a camp site, and it's there that Sandy discovers the impossible: she has inadvertently stumbled upon the place-- and people--she's been looking for all her life, a land where all the missing people go. A world away from her loved ones and the home she ran from for so long, Sandy soon resorts to her old habit again, searching. Though this time, she is desperately trying to find her way home...

Acclaimed novelist Cecelia Ahern's There's No Place Like Here tells the story of Sandy Shortt, an obsessive-compulsive Missing Persons investigator who suddenly finds herself in the mystical land of the missing, desperate to return to the people and places from whom she has spent her life escaping. With this imaginative fourth novel, Ahern, whose P.S. I Love You was made into a major motion picture, continues to establish herself as not only an icon of Irish chick lit, but also a bold and creative thinker.

Continuing the whimsical trend she started with If You Could See Me Now, Ahern asks readers to step outside the boundaries of reality, and enter a world where missing people (and possessions) from all over the globe congregate to start anew. When Sandy goes on an early morning jog and strays too far into the forest, she too finds herself "Here," the aptly named home of the missing. In addition to finding her lost socks, diaries, and stuffed animals, she also finds many of the people she has searched for throughout her career. From Bobby Stanley, who disappeared from his mother's house at the age of sixteen, to Terrence O'Malley, a librarian who disappeared on his way home from work at age 55, Sandy is quickly reunited with the people she has come to know only through photos and heartbreaking memories shared by devastated loved ones who enlisted her services. Of course, finding these people and possessions only makes Sandy realize how much she has missed out on in her real life, most notably her concerned parents and her on again off again boyfriend Greg.

There's No Place Like Here is often predictable and the premise is a bit hard to swallow at times. Still, readers who take the leap will be rewarded with what is ultimately a witty, compassionate, and captivating love story. --Gisele Toueg