From The Page 69 Test:
It’s funny, the Page 69 Test, because page 69 of Songs for the Missing is both representative and an anomaly. [read more]
From Backstory:
The summer I was 17, I worked at a camp in Northeast Ohio, on the Lake Erie shore. I was courting the girl who would later become (and still is) my wife, and many nights we would be up late, watching the slow progress of the oreboats and gazing at the stars over the water. [read more]
San Francisco Chronicle: 50 Best Fiction, Poetry Books of 2008
O’Nan’s novel imagines the people left behind after a teenager’s disappearance. It’s about the ordinariness of unthinkable loss.
January Magazine: Best Books of 2008
With an almost forensic efficiency, O’Nan examines the effect of the mystery on the family, friends and the entire town. What happened to 18-year-old Kim Larsen is less important than how her parents and sister deal with the emotional aftershocks.
Hartford Courant: Best Reads of 2008
Stewart O’Nan, our own bard of Avon, gave us a searing account of what a family goes through when a child disappears. “Songs for the Missing” is a tense tale that pounds home the discomfiting truth that in order to get vital help and attention, such families must quickly learn to “market” their grief and anxiety.
Chicago Sun-Times: Favorite Books of 2008
Stewart O’Nan’s Songs for the Missing: Working in the realist tradition of Richard Yates, O’Nan depicts the heartbreaking ramifications of a loved one gone missing, expertly weaving his astute behavioral observations into taut and gripping prose. Edward Champion
L.A. Times: 2008 Crime Fiction Favorite
Stewart O’Nan’s “Song From the Missing” (Viking), meanwhile, is predicated on the disappearance of a teenage girl, but it steers clear of tabloid lures to delve into the small details; the story rings with quiet emotional truth.
Washington Post: Best Books of 2008
Songs for the Missing, by Stewart O’Nan (Viking). A pretty 18-year old girl drives to her job at a gas station, but never arrives. Her disappearance is at the heart of this novel, but its real concern is with her devastated family.
From The Toronto Star:
“If you look at the early stories of Yates and the early stories of Carver, the diction is very much the same,” says novelist Stewart O’Nan, who championed Yates’s writing in an influential 1999 Boston Review essay “The Lost World of Richard Yates: How the Great Writer of the Age of Anxiety Disappeared from Print.” [Read more]
From KQED Writers’ Block:
Stewart O’Nan reads a passage from Songs for the Missing, the story of a young girl’s disappearance and its effect on those left behind.
[Direct link to reading (mp3 format)]
From The Lyme Times (Lyme, CT):
His new novel, Songs for the Missing, is a disturbing yet empathetically written and enlightening behind-the-scenes portrait of a couple coping with the sudden disappearance of their college-bound daughter and what happens long after the TV crews are gone.
In a recent interview, O’Nan told the Times that he based the book on the disappearance of 19-year-old Katie Poirier, who a decade ago was abducted from a convenience store in Minnesota.
The Works of Stewart O'Nan 