Release date: February 26, 2008 | Series: Bantam Discovery
Life changes in an instant. On a foggy beach. In the seconds when Abby Mason—photographer, fiancée soon-to-be-stepmother—looks into her camera and commits her greatest error. Heartbreaking, uplifting, and beautifully told, here is the riveting tale of a family torn apart, of the search for the truth behind a child’s disappearance, and of one woman’s unwavering faith in the redemptive power of love—all made startlingly fresh through Michelle Richmond’s incandescent sensitivity and extraordinary insight.
Six-year-old Emma vanished into the thick San Francisco fog. Or into the heaving Pacific. Or somewhere just beyond: to a parking lot, a stranger’s van, or a road with traffic flashing by. Devastated by guilt, haunted by her fears about becoming a stepmother, Abby refuses to believe that Emma is dead. And so she searches for clues about what happened that morning—and cannot stop the flood of memories reaching from her own childhood to illuminate that irreversible moment on the beach.
Now, as the days drag into weeks, as the police lose interest and fliers fade on telephone poles, Emma’s father finds solace in religion and scientific probability—but Abby can only wander the beaches and city streets, attempting to recover the past and the little girl she lost. With her life at a crossroads, she will leave San Francisco for a country thousands of miles away. And there, by the side of another sea, on a journey that has led her to another man and into a strange subculture of wanderers and surfers, Abby will make the most astounding discovery of all—as the truth of Emma’s disappearance unravels with stunning force.
A profoundly original novel of family, loss, and hope—of the choices we make and the choices made for us—The Year of Fog beguiles with the mysteries of time and memory even as it lays bare the deep and wondrous workings of the human heart. The result is a mesmerizing tour de force that will touch anyone who knows what it means to love a child.
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Michelle Richmond grew up in Mobile, Alabama, attended The University of Alabama and the University of Miami, and settled in San Francisco in 1999. Her first book, a collection of linked stories entitled THE GIRL IN THE FALL-AWAY DRESS, was published by University of Massachusetts Press in 2001. Her debut novel, DREAM OF THE BLUE ROOM, was published in 2003, followed by THE YEAR OF FOG (2007) and NO ONE YOU KNOW (2008).
THE YEAR OF FOG went on to become a New York Times bestseller, as well as a major bestseller in France. Richmond has two books coming out in March of 2014, a novel with Bantam and a story collection with Fiction Collective 2. She has received the Catherine Doctorow Innovative Fiction Prize, the Hillsdale Award for Fiction from the Fellowship of Southern Writers, the Associated Writing Programs Award, and the Mississippi Review Fiction Prize. Visit michellerichmond.com for updates, book giveaways, and links to Michell's facebook, twitter, Pinterest, and Tumblr accounts.
From the author: "For me, a novel always begins with a place and a character, and unfolds from there. My first two books are rooted in the Southern landscape of my childhood. Without the place out of which they grew, those books would not exist. My subsequent books--The Year of Fog, No One You Know, and my forthcoming novel--could, in my mind, only take place in the San Francisco Bay Area. San Francisco has been my home for a decade. It's the place that fills my days and my imagination, and it inevitably finds its way into my novels. "
This is a book about a parent's worst nightmare. Unlike similar books, such as Beth Gutcheon's Still Missing, this book goes beyond the facts of a girl who disappears. The father, Jake, sticks to a police-procedural approach in trying to locate his daughter, sending out flyers, offering a reward, setting up a web site, appearing on television and radio. But Abby, Jake's fiance, feels responsible for the girl's disappearance and takes a much more imaginative approach. The themes of the book are presented through Abby's eyes. One is memory, recall of details, hypnosis, looking for clues that might have been overlooked. Abby and her friend Nell study the workings of memory, amnesia, the inability to forget. Another is the passing of time and the artificiality of time. The police say the longer a child is missing, the less likely he/she will turn up alive. Jake accepts this, Abby studies what time may mean. Abby is a photographer and looks for clues in her pictures. Jake and Abby are in agony, and I feel the story is realistic, including what eventually happens. There are different possibilities when a child disappears. She may eventually be found alive, like Elizabeth Smart in Utah. That doesn't mean she's undamaged. She may be found dead, like the child of one of the characters in a support group in the book. A child may be dead, but it can turn out there was no abduction, like the case of two boys in Milwaukee, Wisconsin last year. After a nationwide search, the boys were found accidentally drowned in McGovern Park lagoon in their own neighborhood. And then there are the children who are never found and the family never knows what happened. Jake wants closure, Abby refuses to give up. Although some people think the book is slow moving, time could really drag for parents in this situation.... I couldn't put the book down and found it interesting up to the end. I think this could turn out to be one of the best books of the year.Read more ›
I picked this book up brand new at a bargain counter in a grocery store. I bought $50 worth of groceries that day. This book was the most nourishing item in the shopping basket.
Abby Mason [the narrator], a young photographer engaged to Jake, the father of charming 6-year-old Emma, 'loses' the child one foggy day at a San Francisco beach. One moment the girl is there-- the next moment she's gone.
The book is the story of everyone's search for the missing child-- especially Abby's search. (The search takes almost a year-- hence the book's title.) But while everyone else is looking in every possible physical nook and cranny of the area, Abby's search takes her into her own past, into the convoluted pathways of memory, into her knowledge of photography, into an exploration of psychology and philosophy worthy of the great literary artists of our time and of all time. [Why this writer isn't classed right alongside the likes of Amy Tan, Joyce Carol Oates, and Alice Walker is a total mystery to me-- she's that good.]
Some reviewers have classified Year of Fog as "Women's Lit," whatever that's supposed to be. I hasten to tell you, it's not just for women. Any halfway or better educated man who isn't addicted to Westerns or Tom Clancy to the exclusion of everything else will find this enthralling and even heart-pounding at times. I literally could not stop reading.
The solution to the 'mystery' is absolutely unpredictable, no matter what you think it's going to be. The characters, especially Abby, will stay with you forever. It's one of the best books I've ever read, and I've read thousands.
I thoroughly enjoyed this heartwrenching book about loss, memory and photography. I could relate well to the main characters and could identify with their emotions and choices. The plot moved at a quick clip and I found myself staying up way too late each night so I could read "one more chapter", fortunately the chapters were very short. Although the story is primarily about a lost child, I learned a lot of useful information about memory and photography along the way. I am a special education teacher and I was interested in many of the theories of memory that were interspersed throughout the entire novel. It's always a bonus when a book read for entertainment takes on an educational bent and provides me with new insights that may help in my profession. Overall, I gave this book 4 stars because it dragged on a tad too long and the ending, while moderately fulfilling, could have packed more of a punch.
This was an okay book, but it was too long and repetitive. I found myself skimming through the endless search scenes. And, in the end, I found the behavior of the main characters a little hard to believe. The protangonist was really a victim. This was no random kidnapping, yet the boyfriend didn't seem to understand that his messed up family stole a year from this poor woman's life. I wanted to smack him in the end.
Like several of the other readers here, I could not put this book down. My book club is reading The Year of Fog for this month's meeting. Typically, I dip into our chosen book now and again, and rarely finish. Not so for The Year of Fog; I devoured it in a few short days--and loved it.
Michelle Richmond writes a beautiful, evocative story set in the San Francisco she clearly knows well and loves. She dances elegantly amongst themes of love and loss and interweaves them with compelling sections on memory and photography.
