“I’ll be fine,” Abigail Blake tells her best friend, Emma, as she leaves the party in the woods. “I’ll just call a cab or something. I’ll figure it out.” But 17-year-old Abigail never comes home. Anna Bailey’s debut novel is set in remote, small-town Colorado, in the close-knit community of Whistling Ridge, rocked by the disappearance of Abigail... Bailey shifts her story back and forth in time, to the period when Abigail was still, vibrantly, alive, and to the weeks after she vanished, when Emma, not trusting the local police, is digging into what really happened that night, and when Whistling Ridge, ruled over by its church, is on the edge of tipping over into violence. This is a striking first novel, a chilling insight into an oppressive world, where bad thoughts and bad deeds ripple just below the surface, out of sight.
Misogyny also rears its head in Anna Bailey’s first novel, Tall Bones (Doubleday, £14.99). Whistling Ridge in Colorado is an insular community presided over by a Christian fundamentalist pastor who considers it entirely legitimate to tell a victim of domestic violence that she should pray for understanding about what she did to deserve it...
Beautifully written and very moving (your heart will ache for a set of people trapped by ignorance, cruelty and trauma), this is an assured debut.
She paints a dark picture of a community desperate to protect its secrets in the wake of the disappearance of 17-year-old Abigail during a party at local beauty spot — Tall Bones...
Gradually, the guilt that seems to haunt everyone in the town creeps to the surface, in spite of the best efforts of the fearsome local pastor to stop it. Both menacing and haunting, it is a compelling and atmospheric debut.
Though set in small-town America, this widely praised debut is by an English author, Anna Bailey. Whispering Ridge is a conservative community in the foothills of the Rockies dominated by a Bible-thumping preacher. When a 17-year-old girl goes missing, last seen near a stone circle known as the Tall Bones, it lifts the lid on festering secrets. The girl’s father is an ardent churchgoer who has beaten his family for years, until her disappearance forces the family’s history into the open. Homophobia, misogyny and racism are at the heart of this harrowing novel, which Bailey wrote after working in a bar in rural Colorado.
