Critics' Opinion:
Readers' rating:
Published Jun 2019
350 pages
Genre: Thrillers
Publication Information
A compulsive, note-perfect debut for fans of The Virgin Suicides and Picnic at Hanging Rock.
We lost all three girls that summer. Let them slip away like the words of some half-remembered song and when one came back, she wasn't the one we were trying to recall to begin with.
Tikka Molloy was eleven and one-sixth years old during the long hot summer of 1992, growing up in a distant suburb in Australia surrounded by encroaching bushland. That summer, the hottest on record, was when the Van Apfel sisters – Hannah, the beautiful Cordelia and Ruth – mysteriously disappeared during the school's Showstopper concert, held at the outdoor amphitheatre by the river. Did they run away? Were they taken? While the search for the sisters unites the small community, the mystery of their disappearance has never been solved.
Now, years later, Tikka has returned home, to try to make sense of that strange moment in time. The summer that shaped her. The girls that she never forgot.
"McLean peels back the layers of one scorching Australian summer, revealing the dark secrets and lies hidden behind the cheerful facade of suburbia. This debut, part coming-of-age story and part crime thriller, is both forceful and unnerving." - Publishers Weekly
"A wry, sad coming-of-age story and a well-crafted first novel." - Kirkus Reviews
"The story is a compelling one, with a nice layer of suspense that keeps the pages turning until its hauntingly melancholy end." - Booklist
"An intriguing, charge-ahead work with real pathos at its center." - Library Journal
"A taut, beautifully written thriller with a scorching expansive setting. The Van Apfel Girls Are Gone is a fantastic debut and a story that lingers." - Lisa Ballantyne, author of Everything She Forgot
This information about The Van Apfel Girls are Gone was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Felicity McLean is an author and journalist. Her debut novel, The Van Apfel Girls are Gone will be published in Australia, NZ, USA, UK, France and Spain. Felicity has appeared at Sydney Writers' Festival and Bundanon Siteworks.
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