Part of the Spell

Autumn 2007. A woman disappears from the small provincial market town where she has lived a quiet respectable community life, raising her family, for years. She leaves behind few clues as to why she might have vanished, or where to. Her absence sends out ripples that begin to connect its diffuse citizens; her daughter, a young dangerously dreamy mother of two, an museum archivist and her 'complicated' partner, a secret, furious blogger whose supposedly secret posts are attracting global interest, and a bemused City risk analyst, each with problems, conflicting desires, joys and confusions of their own. The disappearance begins to implicate and involve them all. This a novel about what it means to say you want 'the quiet life' in the modern world, about the contracts we enter - love, marriages, houses and work, about community, nostalgia and neighbourliness.