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 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.

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Songs for the Missing begins in the familiar territory of a mystery novel, but the latest Stewart O’Nan narrative veers in another direction: Rather than solve the mystery, O’Nan studies what happens to the friends and relatives left behind.

The 47-year-old author — who will read from the new novel and Last Night at the Lobster (2007) tonight during an “Evenings With Authors” event — spoke recently from his home in Connecticut.

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