'Remarkable...a rip-roaring adventure novel with a true depth of feeling' Sunday Times 'A joy to read' Herald The First World War ended the day Sam Simoneaux's regiment reached France, but he saw more than enough of its ravages. Returning to New Orleans, he determines to put mayhem and destruction behind him, and to make a fresh start with his wife. But when a little girl is abducted on his watch at a department store, he has no choice but to help find her. Steeped in the langorous rhythms and music of Prohibition-era Louisiana, The Missing vividly evokes a ragged frontier nation where violence is normal and the law easy to dodge. Relentlessly suspenseful and profoundly affecting, this is an enthralling tale of vengeance, conscience and redemption by an exceptional writer.

A petty thief is bested by a widow and her card-playing friends; a farmer must cope with raising his baby granddaughter; a train engineer inadvertently causes a major disaster and finds himself amidst a media frenzy; a young man falls in love with a voice on the radio; and a camera repairman discovers a woman's family history in a roll of undeveloped film. Ordinary people are confronted with extraordinary situations, with results that are sometimes comic, sometimes tragic, but always life changing. In stories filled with heart and humour, Tim Gautreaux explores the stresses and strains of everyday life as his characters struggle to make amends for their mistakes and hope for different, better days to come.

Byron Aldridge, heir to a timber empire, returns from the First World War a changed man and finds refuge as a company policeman in a backwoods Louisiana sawmill. Soon his younger brother Randolph tracks him down, assuming charge of the mill in the hope of rescuing his former idol. But as the brothers try to understand each other and their wives contend with their own hopes and fears, it is Randolph who starts a feud with the Sicilians who control the whisky and girls, and the future grows fearsome for them all.

Set largely in rural Louisiana, Tim Gautreaux's masterful debut story collection follows men and women whose ordinary lives reach a point of rupture, a moment when convention gives way to crisis and everything changes: A drunken train engineer charges toward disaster, a father borrows and old airplane to chase down his daughter's kidnapper, a young man falls in love with a voice on the radio. Written with humor, suspense, and a powerful affection for humanity in all its wild forms, "Same Place, Same Things" is the first great work by a master of the form.

A "New York Times "Notable Book of the Year
In eleven raucous, touching stories, Tim Gautreaux traces the course of sin and redemption through the lives of small-town women and men in Louisiana. His unforgettable characters include a grandfather who discovers, while ctaking care of his grandchildren, that they are growing up without any sense at all of right and wrong; a camera repairman who discovers a woman's secret in her undeveloped film; and a one-armed hitchhiker who changes the life of the man who picks her up. Each one a small miracle of storytelling and compassion, Tim Gautreaux's stories are "a pleasure from start to finish. You want to hand [this book] to your friends and say 'read this' " ("The Plain Dealer").

Bringing the same light and gentle understanding that he did to the story collection Same Place, Same Things, author Tim Gautreaux tells the tale of Paul and Colette, star-crossed and factious lovers struggling to make it in rural south Louisiana. When Colette, fed up with small town life, perceives yet another indiscretion by the fun-loving Paul, she heads for Los Angeles, with big dreams and Paul in tow. Paul's attempts to draw his beautiful young wife back home to the Cajun bayou, and back to his heart, make up a tale filled with warmth, devotion and majestically constructed scenes of Southern life.

The author of "The Clearing" ("the finest American novel in a long, long time"--Annie Proulx) now surpasses himself with a story whose range and cast of characters is even broader, with the fate of a stolen child looming throughout.
Sam Simoneaux's troopship docked in France just as World War I came to an end. Still, what he saw of the devastation there sent him back to New Orleans eager for a normal life and a job as a floorwalker in the city's biggest department store, and to start anew with his wife years after losing a son to illness. But when a little girl disappears from the store on his shift, he loses his job and soon joins her parents working on a steamboat plying the Mississippi and providing musical entertainment en route. Sam comes to suspect that on the downriver journey someone had seen this magical child and arranged to steal her away, and this quest leads him not only into this raucous new life on the river and in the towns along its banks but also on a journey deep into the Arkansas wilderness. Here he begins to piece together what had happened to the girl--a discovery that endangers everyone involved and sheds new light on the massacre of his own family decades before.
Tim Gautreaux brings to vivid life the exotic world of steamboats and shifting currents and rough crowds, of the music of the twenties, of a nation lurching away from war into an uneasy peace at a time when civilization was only beginning to penetrate a hinterlands in which law was often an unknown force. "The Missing" is the story of a man fighting to redeem himself, of parents coping with horrific loss with only a whisper of hope to sustain them, of others for whom kidnapping is either only a job or a dream come true. The suspense--and the complicated web of violence that eventually links Sam to complete strangers--is relentless, urgently engaging and, ultimately, profoundly moving, the finest demonstration yet of Gautreaux's understanding of landscape, history, human travail, and hope.

"From the Hardcover edition."