All Things Cease To Appear

Art history professor George Clare comes home to his upstate New York farmhouse to find Catherine, his wife, murdered and their toddler daughter alone in her room. Instead of the traditional whodunit path, however, Brundage takes the reader back in time to reveal what led to this devastating event. It's not just a history of the Clares and their move from Manhattan to a depressed rural town; it's about their neighbors, George's free-spirited colleagues, and the boys who perform odd jobs around the property. Each person connected to the family has their own story and perspective, and the author elegantly shifts among them all until the truth comes into focus. In examining the inconsistency of memory, Brundage plays with how things look vs. how things actually are. The structure of her transcendent work allows readers to see how characters experience events in the moment, reflect upon them later, and then examine them years after the fact.