Fates Will Find Their Way

Sixteen-year-old Nora Lindell is missing. And the neighbourhood boys she's left behind are caught forever in the heady current of her absence. As the days and years pile up, the mystery of her disappearance grows kaleidoscopically. A collection of rumours, divergent suspicions, and tantalising what-ifs, Nora Lindell's story is a shadowy projection of teenage lust, friendship, reverence, and regret, captured magically in the disembodied plural voice of the boys who still long for her. Told in haunting, percussive prose, Hannah Pittard's beautifully crafted novel tracks the emotional progress of the younger sister Nora left behind, the other families in their leafy suburban enclave, and the individual fates of the boys in her thrall. Far more eager to imagine Nora's fate than to scrutinise their own, the boys sleepwalk into an adulthood of jobs, marriages, families, homes and daughters of their own, all the while pining for a girl - and a life - that no longer exists, except in the imagination. A masterful literary debut that shines a light into the dream-filled space between childhood and all that follows, The Fates Will Find Their Way is a story about the stories we tell ourselves - of who we once were and might someday become.