Marilou is Everywhere

Hamish Hamilton, Penguin Books, 2019. Good secondhand condition.

One summer, a teenager disappears from Deep Valley, Pennsylvania. Jude is beautiful, intelligent, and mixed race. The cops search for her - but not as hard as they would if she were a white girl. Watching this mystery unfold is Cindy, a younger girl from a white trash family, who has idolised Jude for years. And so, in the absence of anyone to give a damn about her, Cindy starts to slip out of her own life and into the space Jude left behind...

Marilou Is Everywhere is a story about the desperation to escape - and the terrible, intimate crimes we commit to do so. Swimming in the rich melancholia of rural America, it is a fall from grace, a moral provocation, and a heartbreaking account of life in the margins.