News & Events

"the touch of a master" Review of Among The Missing - Richmond Times-Dispatch

Posted on: Tuesday, June 28, 2011

  By JAY STRAFFORD | Richmond Times-Dispatch published 26 June 011

"Where do the wounded turn when torn from their families? Some retreat inward, where their emotional injuries fester and destroy. Others seek comfort in strangers, where the potential for healing exists — but so does that for harm.

Scottish writer Morag Joss examines the possibilities in her latest stand-alone novel, "Among the Missing" (272 pages, Delacorte, $25), a study in grief, fear and trust.

When a bridge collapses near Inverness, taking several vehicles and lives with it, 42-year-old Annabel sees an opportunity. Annabel and her husband, Colin — each other's first spouse — are vacationing nearby, and Annabel has just told Colin, who had made clear that he does not want children, that she's pregnant. Given the choice of terminating her pregnancy or losing Colin, Annabel selects a different route: she realizes that the authorities will believe she is among the bridge-collapse victims and opts to disappear.

For Silva, an illegal immigrant in her early 20s, the tragedy has taken her husband, Stefan, and their toddler daughter, Anna — but Silva continues to insist that they are alive and will return. And then there's Ron, a 50-year-old former bus driver recently released from five years in prison — he fell asleep at the wheel, and the resulting crash killed six children and a pregnant woman. His wife divorced him, his family wants no part of him, and he's left alone to work odd jobs. When he signs on as a boatman to ferry repair workers across the river, his path intersects with those of Annabel and Silva, and the three share a derelict cabin and meld into an improvised family. 

But tensions of varying degrees run through any family, and the three find, when the river disgorges a terrible secret, that the calamity that drew them together might also tear their lives even further apart.

Joss allows Annabel and Silva to tell their stories in the first person but relates Ron's in the third. The technique succeeds, as the prose soars in the women's accounts but returns to Earth in that of Ron, the most grounded of the three. And she builds the suspense with the touch of a master until her tale reaches a climax at once devastating and redemptive. "Among the Missing" — haunting and affecting — is a novel so striking that the reader will feel the rush of the river, the collapse of the girders and, most of all, the compassion of its creator."