Songs for the Missing

Praise for Songs for the Missing

A Washington Post , Los Angeles Times , San Francisco Chronicle , Chicago Sun-Times and Pittsburgh Post-Gazette Best Book of 2008

"This is a novel about loss and healing; a novel that acknowledges the depth of loss and the limits of healing. . . . You could call this novel many things. You could call it a mystery. You could call it a thriller. You could even call it a self-help book, for reading it slowly and carefully causes one to consider love and sorrow in a much larger context than simply that of this well-paced tale. O'Nan has a remarkable ability to pinpoint the ways in which hope and suffering are intertwined. . . . This is a fine, absorbing book. It's easy to imagine that O'Nan is on a kind of mission to restore a simple, true sense of humanity to the novel: a worthy goal, indeed."

- The New York Times Book Review

"Some books should come with warnings. That's not a complaint, at least in the case of Stewart O'Nan's haunting novel Songs for the Missing , which kept me up most of the night. . . . O'Nan, a former aviation engineer, describes emotional roller coasters in prose that's remarkably taut and precise."

-Bob Minzesheimer, USA Today

" Songs for the Missing has a plot that is deceptively easy to summarize, but the book has a mood so subtle that only first-rate fiction can evoke it. . . . As we read, we, too, are changed, and in ways we cannot even understand. . . . It's the sort of experience that reveals why we read in the first place, knowing that the sadness we find inside a book mirrors the sadness always within reach."

- San Francisco Chronicle

"Art, like athletics, is all about making it look easy. That's the special magic behind the work of Stewart O'Nan, a novelist who brings his uncommon gifts to the task of rendering the common world. He writes with quiet precision about people we all know, people in regular jobs with lives we can all recognize, and the result is work that shimmers