World Gone Missing

In World Gone Missing, Laurie Ann Doyle’s powerful debut collection, people have disappeared. In these twelve stories set in and around San Francisco, contemporary issues—divorce, sexual identity, homelessness—thread through a cast of memorable characters struggling to fill the void of a missing loved one. From the newly married couple anxiously searching for a brother who didn’t come home one night, to the successful businesswoman increasingly obsessed with a high school friend she hasn’t seen in decades, to the middle-aged clerk meet her son’s birth-mother for the first time, Doyle’s writing vividly evokes the loss and liberation absence can bring.