Aoife Clifford

They're talking to each other.

And the older one tells the younger one an amazing story about a village that disappeared in a tsunami, that it happened so quickly that the next village didn't even realise.

And it wasn't until night time and they looked out and saw that there were no lights, that they realised an entire village had been taken.

And just as you're sort of processing this really creepily evocative story, Alonya and Sophia are kidnapped and so they disappear.

And it's that disappearance that then shadows the entire narrative.

And each chapter is a month in this year.

And the disappearance of the girls affects the characters in that chapter in different ways.

In some ways, it's quite a remote connection.

It's that they see a wanted poster.

And in some ways, it's very, very direct when you have chapters that involve relatives of the girls or indeed relatives of another missing girl.

So it's quite an amazing book.

Each chapter is...

a different woman's perspective.

So even though there are a lot of male characters, there are a lot of characters in this book altogether, each chapter has a different, is focused on a different woman.

And so we get these quite incredible perspectives from all the different peoples that live on the peninsula.

I would totally agree with that because the disappearance is not the central kind of plot.

It's this shadow that's there in the background and sometimes moves towards the foreground and then recedes again.

as we visit all these other people's lives.

So in a way, well, the structure is something like, say, Elizabeth Strout's Olive Kitteridge, where they interlink and you see the same characters in different ways, but it can be quite a loose linking at some stages and it can be as intricate as a puzzle at other stages.

It also reminded me of, I don't know if you've read it, the John McGregor Reservoir 13, which I think is a brilliant book.