The discovery of a body by an ostracised 13 year old girl exposes the intense, claustrophobic and desparate lives of the characters in this fictionalised small American town. Their stories, brilliantly captured, really drive the narrative along in this excellent debut.
This literary mystery is a highly absorbing read - hard to think of it as a debut - and definitely a good candidate for reading groups.
Thirteen-year-old Emily Houchens doesn't have many friends. She spends her time alone in the woods near her house - her safe place, until she finds the body of a young woman. Susanna Mitchell is searching for her sister, Ronnie, who vanished after leaving a late-night bar. The more she discovers about Ronnie's life, the more she realises that her sister began to disappear long before she went missing. THE NEXT TIME YOU SEE ME explores the fault-lines of a small community - their hidden desires and their other, secret selves.
Holly Goddard Jones is the author of Girl Trouble: Stories (Harper Perennial 2009). Her fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in Tin House, Epoch, Best American Mystery Stories, New Stories from the South, and elsewhere, and she was a 2007 recipient of the Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers' Award. She teaches in the MFA program at UNC Greensboro and lives in North Carolina with her husband, Brandon. The Next Time You See Me is her first novel.
