Vanished
A Novel
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4.1 • 15 Ratings
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- $15.99
Publisher Description
National Book Award Finalist: A man, woman, and child are bound by a desperate need—and a terrible secret—in this suspenseful, "astonishing" novel (Vogue).
Aubrey Wallace is the kind of man no one notices. Dotty Johnson is the kind of woman no one can ignore. One afternoon, they both disappear from the small Vermont town where they live. The next day, two hundred miles away, a toddler is kidnapped from her Massachusetts home.
For the next five years, Aubrey, Dotty, and the kidnapped child—united by a mix of strange love, desperate need, and the crime that brought them together—are trapped in a nomadic existence governed by their constant fear of discovery. Canny, the little girl, becomes Aubrey's entire existence. But Dotty wants out. She is tired of being saddled with this fearful man, and when she meets a brutal ex-convict, the wheels of Canny's return to her natural parents are wrenched fatally into motion.
A dark, riveting tale about the impulses and weaknesses that underlie an evil act, Vanished was nominated for both the National Book Award and the PEN/Faulkner Award, and marked the debut of the New York Times–bestselling author of Songs in Ordinary Time and A Dangerous Woman.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In Morris's strong and painful first novel Aubrey Wallace, a simple, goodhearted laborer on a Vermont road crew, thinks the frail girl who beckons to him from a wooded stream looks like a picture book fairy. And like some malevolent enchantress, Dottycute, tarty, amoral and utterly freaked outenthralls Aubrey and lures him away from his family to his ultimate ruin. Sexually mistreated as a child, Dotty has committed atrocities that surface only later in the narrative. She has also kidnapped a baby girl named Canny. Now Dotty enlists Aubrey's help in making a wandering, criminal half-life for the three of them, as they bounce around the countryside for five years in a pickup truck. When they run into degenerate ex-con Jiggy Huller, living in backwoods squalor with his bovine wife Alma and their sad little girls, Dotty is nearly outmatched. A clumsy scheme is cobbled to collect ransom money from Canny's wealthy parents. But Aubrey loves poor-nit-infested, rheumy-eyed Canny, who clings to him screaming with terror, ``Don't dump me, Poppy.'' The story drives inexorably to its cynical and wrenching climax, fueled on booze, drugs and human misery.
