Dispatches From The Field: Joe says, "This is a mesmerizing book."

Sixteen-year-old Nora Lindell is missing. And the neighborhood boys she's left behind are caught forever in the heady current of her absence.

As the days and years pile up, the mystery of her disappearance grows kaleidoscopically. A collection of rumors, divergent suspicions, and tantalizing what-ifs, Nora Lindell's story is a shadowy projection of teenage lust, friendship, reverence, and regret, captured magically in the disembodied plural voice of the boys who still long for her.

Told in haunting, percussive prose, Hannah Pittard's beautifully crafted novel tracks the emotional progress of the sister Nora left behind, the other families in their leafy suburban enclave, and the individual fates of the boys in her thrall. Far more eager to imagine Nora's fate than to scrutinize their own, the boys sleepwalk into an adulthood of jobs, marriages, families, homes, and daughters of their own, all the while pining for a girl–and a life–that no longer exists, except in the imagination.

A masterful literary debut that shines a light into the dream-filled space between childhood and all that follows, The Fates Will Find Their Way is a story about the stories we tell ourselves–of who we once were and may someday become.

Joe's review:
"This is Pittard's debut novel, but it is written with the confidence and skill of a long-term novelist. The story is told in first person plural by a group of boys who become men whose central event in all of their lives is the disappearance of Nora Lindell when they were all 16. Her disappearance borders, at times, on obsession for them: what happened to her that Halloween night she went out and never returned? Did she survive? If she did not survive, how did she die? What was she thinking? But if she did survive, where is she now? Is she in Arizona? And what of her younger sister, Sissy? Why did she move out west, and are these three children hers? Sissy becomes as much a part of their mysterious imagination as Nora. The book follows the boys as they age, as they marry, have children of their own, start what should be their lives. But they are haunted by Nora. Spurred by sightings in airports, on the news, in a museum photograph; they never let Nora die. They keep it to themselves, unspoken except when they can get together to drink a beer and talk it through. This is a mesmerizing book. Short & powerfully haunting. The collective narrators' lives pass by in a blur of dreaming of what could be, while the lives they lead at some point become unfamiliar, lost. There is a lot in this small novel: amazingly compelling prose, narration that at times just grips the reader with a "I've thought that and never told anyone" jolt, and a story that is heartbreaking because it could be true. I am looking forward to reading Hannah Pittard for years to come."


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