Without Her

May 27, 2019
This standout novel of a tested friendship from Brackenbury (Becoming George Sand) is highlighted by fine prose and finely drawn characters. Claudia Prescott, a worldly Brit in her 60s, thinks back on her lifelong friendship with the free-spirited Hannah Farrell. Claudia, who has become a professor of filmmaking in Virginia, is scheduled to visit Hannah and her husband, Philip, in France, where the couple has a second home. When Philip contacts Claudia before her departure and tells her Hannah has disappeared, Claudia finishes her semester early to help and console Philip, but she stops briefly in Paris to see an old lover, Alexandre. Claudia and Hannah met Alexandre when they were students in the 1960s, and although it was Claudia who engaged in a decades-long affair with him, she has suspected that Hannah had at least one dalliance with him. Hannah, who had married young, has adult children who join the search with Claudia and Philip, but as Claudia combs her mind for clues as to where and why Hannah might have gone, she continually returns to her friend’s youthful unreliability—something she doesn’t seem to have continued with her husband. Brackenbury reaches into the heart of a long, complicated friendship, and the result is a skilled combination of a missing-person mystery and a sentimental reminiscence.

Narrator Alison Larkin presents a novel that takes place between the 1960s and the present. Claudia and Hannah meet at an English boarding school and become lifelong friends despite opposite personalities. Later, listeners accompany Claudia to France after she receives a pleading phone call from Hannah's husband, Philip, telling her that Hannah has mysteriously disappeared. As Claudia reflects, she realizes Hannah is possibly doing what she often did when she was young--vanishing for reasons of her own. Larkin's skillfully rendered accents, evocative descriptions, and portrayal of the painfully ill Hannah are the best parts of a story featuring inactivity and unappealing characters. Most frustrating are Philip's dithering, and Claudia's lover's shallowness. Larkin's performance stabilizes the story's frequent shifts in time and unexpected conclusion. S.G.B. � AudioFile 2020, Portland, Maine