Elizabeth is Missing

Emma Healey

VIKING

Elizabeth is missing is the story of an old woman who is losing her mind, but still holds on to one idea. She is convinced that her friend elizabeth is missing. She wants to find out what happened to her. Maud horsham is in her eighties and suffers from dementia. She needs a full time caregiver as she cannot remember what she did a minute ago. She can make herself a cup of tea, but she cannot remember to drink it. She is able to go out shopping, but forgets what she wants to buy. Her long suffering daughter, helen, regularly visits her and sometimes maud's granddaughter katie comes along too. Maud keeps telling everyone her suspicions and concerns about elizabeth. No one takes her seriously. Elizabeth's son peter is annoyed by her persistence and helen is also irritated. The police are a bit amused by her and so is her granddaughter. But, to muad herself, the matter is very serious. She endangers her own safety by leaving the house in search of clues. Intertwined with this mystery is another one: the very real disappearance of maud's sister sukey many decades back. Sukey, maud's glamorous older sister, married frank after the end of the second world war. Frank was not the most desirable of suitors, it was suspected that he might have been involved in black - market trading. Soon after her marriage, sukey disappeared and no one has seen her since. Maud and her parents had searched for her for a long time, without finding anything about her fate. The novel's narrative switches between the present and the time of sukey's disappearance. As the story explores the intertwined double mysteries, it also traces maud's slow descent, as her condition becomes steadily worse, even as she pursues the issue of her friend's whereabouts. Eventually, maud is unable to recognise her own daughter and granddaughter. Elizabeth is missing has been published by viking in 2014.

Literature & Fiction

Literary

Whistle In The Dark

Knopf Canada

Emma Healey just wants to be a writer, but that’s more a journey than a job, and the journey isn’t free. As a teenager, she begins her adventures in precarious employment when introduced by her actor/playwright mother to the role of “standardized patient,” performing illness as a living training dummy for medical students. In university, she joins a creative writing program, cultivating a poet’s interest in language while learning lessons about the literary world that have more to do with survival than art. Through her twenties, she writes software manuals for the world’s leading producer of online pornography, masters search engine optimization for a marketing firm run out of a bedroom by two Phish-loving brothers, narrowly escapes death as a research assistant for a television drama, and works the night shift captioning daytime TV. Along the way, as she navigates dating apps, tumultuous relationships, and the evolution of a voice that she is slowly learning to trust, she begins writing personal essays for money—and finds herself embroiled in a content economy that blurs the boundaries between day job and making art even further. Through the stories of several very odd jobs, each related to—but also achingly far from—the job she really wants, poet and essayist Emma Healey creates a unique snapshot of the gig economy that is also a timeless meditation on identity, value, and language. For a writer trying to pay the bills, life can be a work in progress.

Best Young Woman Job Book: A Memoir

Random House Canada

[Read by Davina Porter] In this darkly riveting debut novel, an elderly woman descending into dementia embarks on a desperate quest to find the best friend she believes has disappeared, and her search for the truth will go back decades and have shattering consequences. Maud, an aging grandmother, is slowly losing her memory - and her grip on everyday life. Yet she refuses to forget her best friend Elizabeth, whom she is convinced is missing and in terrible danger. But no one will listen to Maud - not her frustrated daughter, Helen, not her caretakers, not the police, and especially not Elizabeth's mercurial son, Peter. Armed with handwritten notes she leaves for herself and an overwhelming feeling that Elizabeth needs her help, Maud resolves to discover the truth and save her beloved friend. This singular obsession forms a cornerstone of Maud's rapidly dissolving present. But the clues she discovers seem only to lead her deeper into her past, to another unsolved disappearance: her sister, Sukey, who vanished shortly after World War II. - - As vivid memories of a tragedy that occurred more fifty years ago come flooding back, Maud discovers new momentum in her search for her friend. Could the mystery of Sukey's disappearance hold the key to finding Elizabeth?

Elizabeth Is Missing

Genre Fiction

HarperCollins Audio and Blackstone Audio

Residing on the border between poetry and prose, Emma Healey masterfully navigates the tension and balance between the two forms. Her writing examines the animate qualities of seemingly inanimate things and explores personal relationships, collective and individual human experiences, as they are distilled through our encounters with such things as the CBC, chain bookstores, the contents of a kitchen, or the expanse of a whole city. Begin With the End in Mind tests the capabilities of the prose poem the specific rhythmic, lyrical, and syntactic possibilities of the form, and the opportunities for play, renegotiating the more traditional/technical elements of lyric and line that are afforded the prose poet.

Begin With the End in Mind

Poetry

Arbeiter Ring Pub

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Books by Emma Healey