The Year of Fog (Bantam Discovery) [Paperback]

Michelle Richmond (Author)

Book Description

Series: Bantam Discovery | Publication Date: February 26, 2008

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.


From the Hardcover edition.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

In this spare page-turner, Richmond (Dream of the Blue Room) draws complex tensions from a the set setup of a child gone missing. Photographer Abby Mason stops on San Francisco's Ocean Beach with her fiancé Jake's six-year-old daughter, Emma, to photograph a seal pup; by the time Abby looks up, Emma has disappeared. Abby, who narrates, flashes back to her growing relationship with high school teacherJake, and sketches its transformation over the course of the search. Emma's mother, Lisbeth (who abandoned the family three years earlier), wants back into Jake's life—even as he is giving up hope on finding Emma. Abby delves into the bereft missing children subculture and into the vagaries of memory. A hypnotist helps Abby unearth promising details of that singular last day with Emma, but the information requires major follow-through from Abby. The book's twist on missing child stories is wholly effective. Richmond develops the principle characters, and Abby's dysfunctional parents make for sharply drawn secondaries, as do local surfers. The book is beautifully paced—one feels Abby's clarity of purpose from the first page. The sure-handed denouement reflects the focus and restraint that Richmond brings to bear throughout. (Mar.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Booklist

Richmond's sophomore effort (after Dream of the Blue Room, 2003) traces a traumatic year in the life of photographer Abby Mason after she loses her fiance's six-year-old daughter. The moment Abby stopped to photograph a dead baby seal while walking on a fog-bound beach in San Francisco is one she will replay in her head a thousand times. That's the last time she saw Emma, who was racing ahead, eager to collect sand dollars. Panic and fear soon give way to sheer exhaustion and emotional shutdown as Abby and Emma's dad, Jake, immerse themselves in the desperate search for the missing first-grader. As the months tick by, Jake becomes convinced that Emma drowned, while Abby is sure that Emma was kidnapped. The trauma and the guilt wreak havoc with their relationship and with their struggle to regain a sense of normalcy. Richmond gracefully explores the nature of memory and perception in key passages that never slow the suspense of the search. Closely echoing Jacquelyn Mitchard's best-selling Deep End of the Ocean (1996), this is a page-turner with a philosophical bent. Joanne Wilkinson
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 416 pages
• Publisher: Bantam Discovery (February 26, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0553385895
• ISBN-13: 978-0553385892
• ASIN: 0385340125
• Product Dimensions: 5 x 1.1 x 8.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (133 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #306,527 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Michelle Richmond grew up in Mobile, Alabama, earned her Bachelors degree from The University of Alabama, and after college lived in several Southern cities before attending the University Miami as a James Michener Fellow.

After receiving her MFA in Creative Writing in Miami, she lived in New York City for a couple of years before settling in San Francisco, where she has made her home ever since. 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. The collection is now available for Kindle. 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, and to be published in ten languages, earning accolades from newspapers around the globe. Now in its 21st paperback printing, The Year of Fog is the 2011 selection of Silicon Valley Reads, which brings 15 Bay Area cities together to read one book.

Richmond has received the Hillsdale Award for Fiction from the Fellowship of Southern Writers, the Associated Writing Programs Award, and the Mississippi Review Fiction Prize. Her stories have appeared in Glimmer Train, Playboy, The Missouri Review, the Kenyon Review, Best American Fantasy, and many other magazines and anthologies. She is currently at work on her next novel, which will be publshed by Bantam in 2011.

From the author:
"For me, a novel always begins with a place and a character, and unfolds from there. My first two books, the linked story collection The Girl in the Fall-Away Dress and the novel Dream of the Blue Room, are rooted in the Southern landscape of my childhood. Without the place out of which they grew, those books would not exist.

Likewise, my subsequent books--The Year of Fog and No One You Know--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. It's also the city in which I am raising my child, which, to me, makes it home.

Wherever you live, and whatever your geographical sensibilities may be, I imagine we share some literary sensibilities...and that a shared loved of storytelling is what brought you to this page. No One You Know is about storytelling, in much the same way that The Year of Fog is about memory. As for the next book, due out from Bantam next year, I'm trying not to talk about it too much. Call me superstitious, but I like to keep a story under wraps until the proofs are at the printer."

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

44 of 45 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars when a child goes missing, June 16, 2007

By 

lisatheratgirl "lisatheratgirl" (New York, NY) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)   

This review is from: The Year of Fog (Hardcover)

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.

17 of 17 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Powerful and Thoughtful Psychological Suspense, March 2, 2008

By 

Warlen Bassham (Bothell, WA United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Year of Fog (Bantam Discovery) (Paperback)

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.

15 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A Really, Really GOOD Book, May 5, 2007

By 

Steven James (Washington State) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Year of Fog (Hardcover)

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.