The Vanishing Place

LoveReading Says

From its arresting prologue - where a terrified, hungry child stumbles into a tiny grocery store in Koraha, unknowingly becoming the second most remarkable thing ever to happen in a settlement of just ninety-two - The Vanishing Place gripped me by the heart. Her muddy dress, her blood-stained hands. Everything about her arrival signals that something is horribly, hauntingly wrong. And yet it’s the familiarity of her face that truly chills the town. She looks exactly like the girl who vanished into the New Zealand bush nearly twenty years earlier. Same face, same green green eyes.

What follows is a beautifully layered, profoundly emotional story told across decades, flipping between the past and the present day. From the wilds of New Zealand, we meet Effie, once the wild girl of the bush, now living half a world away in the Isle of Skye but still carrying the forest in her bones. The bush has never left her; it lies dormant. The trauma buried deep inside.

After tragedy struck in 2001 Ellie left her home. Their hut in the depths of the bush. She left the boy who once rescued a scrawny redheaded girl from the waves. Lewis, older by three years, the one who saved her again and again. Then seventeen years later, Lewis calls. Their connection is still fierce, still threaded with shared secrets, and shared survival. To answer his call means returning to the thousand greens of her childhood: the podocarp forests rising like gods, the sweet scent of tawhai bark, the roaring Billy River, the hut that once held safety, light, and love. But it also means confronting what happened the night she vanished into the trees. And what Lewis did to save her.

This novel is a sucker punch of a story. Tears came early for me and kept on coming. My chest tight with Effie’s grief, her love, her rage, her longing. The Vanishing Place is a story born of bush and wildness, stitched with trauma and tenderness. Oh the trauma.  Atmospheric, moving, and rich with a sense of place, it’s a book that will stay with you long after the final page.

It’s Educated meets Where the Crawdads Sing: an unforgettable exploration of wilderness, survival, identity, and the bonds that tether us to the people who make us, who shape us - sometimes gently, sometimes violently. A horrifyingly beautiful Star of Stars. And what a debut! 

Deborah Maclaren

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