LAST SEEN

When a teenage boy goes missing from a small community, the adults must reckon with the past.

Sarah Symonds wakes in her beach hut on Longstone Sandbank near Bristol, England; it’s the day after her son Jacob’s 17th birthday, and she never heard him come home. She wouldn’t be too worried except that they’d had a fight before he left the house. As the day drags on, no one seems to know where Jacob is—he didn’t spend the night with his friends or his girlfriend. That evening, Sarah and her husband, Nick, reach out to the police. And they finally have to acknowledge a painful coincidence: Seven years ago, another boy disappeared and has always been presumed drowned, and Jacob was with him that day. Marley Berry was not only Jacob’s best friend, but also the son of Sarah’s best friend, Isla. The two women grew up together; they bought their huts on the beach to be near one another. They were pregnant together. And Nick was Isla’s first love. But in the present, seven years after Marley’s presumed death, the women have started to grow apart. Things seem particularly precarious this summer, and these little cacophonies in their decades-old friendship hint at deep, destructive secrets: secrets that may finally break to the surface with Jacob’s disappearance. Clarke alternates between the present and the past, between Sarah’s point of view and Isla’s, to weave a full tapestry. She explores how even the most intimate and beautiful friendships are vulnerable to the instinct for self-protection and the passion of grief. Clarke does unveil twists at the very end, but they’re not plot-centered; instead, they encompass the full development of the very human, flawed, and wounded main characters. Both strong women, they make their choices and they stand by them, even at great cost.

Melancholy yet compulsively readable.