Description

A girl’s disappearance in Australia induces a family reckoning in this “dark and lovely work . . . full of elegance and mystery” (The New York Times Book Review).

A two-time winner of Australia’s prestigious The Age Book of the Year Award, Joan London’s debut novel, Gilgamesh, a New York Times Notable Book, was published to rapturous acclaim both in her native Australia and in the United States. Now, London delivers The Good Parents, a “completely absorbing” tale of mother love and the harrowing moment when a daughter spreads her wings and vanishes from her parents’ orbit (The Boston Globe).

Maya de Jong is a shy, sweet, eighteen-year-old country girl who moves to Melbourne and begins an affair with her older, married boss. When Maya’s parents, Toni and Jacob, arrive for a visit, Maya is gone, and no one knows where. Maya, for reasons of her own, leaves haunting clues in late-night calls to her brother at home, carefully—and puzzlingly—avoiding detection by the two people who love her most. Ultimately, to find her daughter Toni will have to revisit a part of her own past that she thought she had shut off forever—the closest she ever came to being a lost girl herself.

The Good Parents is a stunning portrait of familial love, delusions and compromises, and how far we can drift apart in the moments between the words we speak. Enthralling, unsettling, and riveting, this “arresting novel . . . explains the attraction of bad love for young women attempting to break free” (The Independent).