In World Gone Missing, Laurie Ann Doyle’s powerful debut collection, people have disappeared. In these twelve stories set in and around San Francisco, contemporary issues—divorce, sexual identity, homelessness—thread through a cast of memorable characters struggling to fill the void of a missing loved one. From the newly married couple anxiously searching for a brother who didn’t come home one night, to the successful businesswoman increasingly obsessed with a high school friend she hasn’t seen in decades, to the middle-aged clerk meet her son’s birth-mother for the first time, Doyle’s writing vividly evokes the loss and liberation absence can bring.
