Sally Holt has always been mystified by the things her older sister, Kathy, seems to have been born knowing. Kathy has answers for all of Sally's questions about life, about love and about Billy Barnes, the high school basketball star who runs the refreshment stand at the local pool. Billy's unfathomable, otherworldly cool puts him on a different planet - until a tragedy leaves Sally's life forever intertwined with his.

Opening in the early nineties and charting almost two decades of shared history and missed connections, Notes on Your Sudden Disappearance is a dazzlingly unconventional love story that brims with unexpected moments of joy.

In her ruefully funny and wickedly perceptive debut novel, Alison Espach deftly dissects matters of the heart and captures the lives of children and adults as they come to terms with life, death, and love.
At the center of this affluent suburban universe is Emily Vidal, a smart and snarky teenager, who gets involved in a suspect relationship with one of the adults after witnessing a suicide in her neighborhood. Among the cast of unforgettable characters is Emily's father, whose fiftieth birthday party has the adults descending upon the Vidal's patio; her mother, who has orchestrated the elaborate party even though she and her husband are getting a divorce; and an assortment of eccentric neighbors, high school teachers, and teenagers who teem with anxiety and sexuality and an unbridled desire to be noticed, and ultimately loved.
An irresistible chronicle of a modern young woman's struggle to grow up, "The Adults" lays bare--in perfect pitch--a world where an adult and a child can so dangerously be mistaken for the same exact thing.