Nobody Is Ever Missing takes its title from John Berryman’s ‘Dream Song 29’, a poem which I’d always thought related to Berryman’s strange sense of guilt over his father’s suicide. At the heart of Catherine Lacey’s novel there is another suicide that brings with it enormous pain and grief, that of the heroine Elyria’s adopted sister Ruby, six years earlier.
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Available from the Spectator Bookshop, £10.99 Tel: 08430 600033. Susie Boyt is the author of My Judy Garland Life and an authority on Henry James and John Berryman.
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