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Overview
Sometimes it takes losing everything to truly find yourself...
Since Sandy Shortt's childhood classmate disappeared twenty years ago, Sandy has been obsessed with missing things. Finding what is lost becomes her single-minded goal—from the lone sock that vanishes in the washing machine to the car keys she misplaced. It's no surprise, then, that Sandy's life's work becomes finding people who have vanished from their loved ones. Sandy's family is baffled and concerned by her increasing preoccupation. Her parents can't understand her compulsion, and she pushes them away further by losing herself in the work of tracking down these missing people. She gives up her life in order to offer a flicker of hope to devastated families...and escape the disappointments of her own.
Jack Ruttle is one of those devastated people. It's been a year since his brother Donal vanished into thin air, and he has enlisted Sandy Shortt to find him. But before she is able to offer Jack the information he so desperately needs, Sandy goes missing too...and Jack now finds himself searching for his brother and the one woman who understood his pain.
One minute Sandy is jogging through the park, the next, she can't figure out where she is. The path is obscured. Nothing is familiar. A clearing up ahead reveals a camp site, and it's there that Sandy discovers the impossible: she has inadvertently stumbled upon the place— and people—she's been looking for all her life, a land where all the missing people go. A world away from her loved ones and the home she ran from for so long, Sandy soon resorts to her old habit again, searching. Though this time, she is desperately trying to find her way home...
Synopsis
Bestselling author Cecelia Ahern, whose sparkling novels have more than 5.5 million copies in print worldwide, returns with an ambitious, absorbing, and romantic tale of things -- and people -- lost and found People disappear every day, some because they choose to leave their old lives behind, and some for more unpleasant reasons. Things, too, disappear: mittens and cell phones, wallets and luggage. In every case, someone is left behind; someone is left to wonder what happened.
Ever since her classmate Jenny-May vanished when they were ten years old, Sandy Shortt has been obsessed with finding things. Now grown, Sandy's obsession has become a calling, with her own agency devoted to locating missing persons. But with every failed case, Sandy is plagued with questions: Where do missing people go? Are they alive or dead? Did they intend to disappear, or did they suffer some cruel fate? As these questions threaten to consume her, Sandy suddenly finds that she, herself, has disappeared, and that she has found all the answers she's always searched for in a magical place where all lost things and people go.
A romance that explores the meaning of loss and love, There's No Place Like Here is Cecelia Ahern's most satisfying, most inspired, most entrancing novel yet.
About the Author
CECELIA AHERN is the daughter of Ireland's prime minister and the author of three previous novels, PS, I Love You; Love, Rosie; and If You Could See Me Now. Foreign rights to her novels have been sold to more than forty countries. She is also the co-creator and producer of an ABC TV sitcom, Girls on a Bus, set to air in Fall 2007. Ahern lives in Dublin, Ireland. She is currently at work on her fifth novel.
Booklist
A positively magical novel, Ahern's latest sparkles with wit, compelling characters, and a truly clever premise. (starred review)
Editorials
Booklist
A positively magical novel, Ahern's latest sparkles with wit, compelling characters, and a truly clever premise. (starred review)Publishers Weekly
Ahern tells the fantastical story of Sandy Shortt, a smalltown Irish girl who, at 10 years old, becomes obsessed with finding lost things after a neighborhood girl disappears. Sandy's parents fret for years about her fixation, eventually finding her help in the form of hunky high school psychologist Gregory Burton. He's not much older than Sandy, and soon enough they're both smitten, though neither moves to pursue a romantic relationship until later, after Sandy graduates and moves to Dublin, where she tracks missing persons for a living. Gregory follows and they start and stall through an awkward courtship that's cut short when Sandy, while on a jog, gets lost and winds up in a strange parallel universe, home to the people and things that have gone missing from the regular world. What happens to Sandy there, and to those she left behind, will determine not only her future but Gregory's as well. Ahern jumps around in time and space, which adds as much confusion as suspense, but the underlying message about cherishing what you have comes through loudly by the end. That a film adaptation of Ahern's P.S., I Love Youis scheduled for release in late December can't hurt sales potential. (Jan.)
Copyright 2007 Reed Business InformationLibrary Journal
Ahern's (If You Could See Me Now) latest novel veers away from traditional chick lit, blending mystery and fantasy. Sandy Shortt, a six-foot, obsessive-compulsive detective and proprietress of a missing-persons agency, has spent her entire life looking for things and people-from that sock lost in the dryer to her childhood rival, Jenny-May Butler. When Sandy gets lost in the woods one day, she discovers a mysterious and magical land where she finally finds all her missing socks, passports, Jenny-May, and even herself. Secondary plotlines include Sandy's on-again, off-again love affair with her former therapist and an intertwining mystery involving one of the missing people. Ahern's novel PS, I Love Youis now a major motion picture starring Hilary Swank and Gerard Butler, and the television series she cocreated with Donald Todd, Samantha Who?, recently made its debut on ABC, so there's bound to be interest. With no mention of shoes or fashion and very little about Sandy's romantic relationship, this book may disappoint readers expecting typical chick-lit fare, but Ahern fans will find it a fascinating and pleasant read. Recommended for popular fiction collections.
—Anika Fajardo