The Missing Person (First Edition)

A powerful debut set in New Mexico over a long hot summer of surprises and discoveries.

Lynn Fleming happily abandoned dusty Albuquerque to study art history in New York, but when her younger brother disappears she reluctantly answers their mother’s summons and returns home. Although she soon finds Wylie among the eco-warriors for whom he’s a philosopher king, she begins to realize how much else is still missing. Her memories of her late cherished father are compromised by her mother’s relationship with a married man. And her fascination with two paintings her father left behind leads her to question everything she’d believed about her parents’ marriage and, by extension, her own behavior. Meanwhile, her attempt to regain Wylie’s affection is unsettled by her affair with one of his cohorts, even as the pranks they play–in order to protect the landscape they see being violated all around them–grow increasingly serious and then spiral out of control, putting everyone at risk.

A story of homecoming and coming-of-age, of convictions shaken and regained, of unspeakable loss and hard-won reconciliation, The Missing Person is funny and piercing throughout, a brilliant beginning to a bright new career.

Alix Ohlin was born in Montreal in 1972, graduated from Harvard University, and studied at the Michener Center for Writers in Austin, Texas. Her fiction has appeared in the One Story series and Shenandoah, among other periodicals, and in Best New American Voices 2004. She has received awards and fellowships from The Atlantic Monthly, the MacDowell Colony, and The Kenyon Review’s Writers Workshop. She lives in Easton, Pennsylvania, and teaches at Lafayette College.