There's No Place Like Here
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4.1 • 14 Ratings
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- $1.99
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- $1.99
Publisher Description
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 . . .
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Ahern tells the fantastical story of Sandy Shortt, a smalltown Irish girl who, at 10 years old, becomes obsessed with finding lost things after a neighborhood girl disappears. Sandy's parents fret for years about her fixation, eventually finding her help in the form of hunky high school psychologist Gregory Burton. He's not much older than Sandy, and soon enough they're both smitten, though neither moves to pursue a romantic relationship until later, after Sandy graduates and moves to Dublin, where she tracks missing persons for a living. Gregory follows and they start and stall through an awkward courtship that's cut short when Sandy, while on a jog, gets lost and winds up in a strange parallel universe, home to the people and things that have gone missing from the regular world. What happens to Sandy there, and to those she left behind, will determine not only her future but Gregory's as well. Ahern jumps around in time and space, which adds as much confusion as suspense, but the underlying message about cherishing what you have comes through loudly by the end. That a film adaptation of Ahern's P.S., I Love You is scheduled for release in late December can't hurt sales potential.
