Tacita is pretending to ignore her husband's affair. Stella can't imagine wanting any more than she has. Theresa is determined to stay so busy, she won't have time to feel guilty. Zeki hopes no-one will find out what he's up to. Jonathan imagined the family running through the woods in their wellies - not the solitary bottles of whisky on the commuter train. And Sheila, a widower, mother and grandmother has disappeared. If only people were more honest about themselves and the people around them. Autumn 2007. A woman disappears from the small provincial market town where she has lived a quiet respectable community life, raising her family, for years. She leaves behind few clues as to why she might have vanished, or where to. Her absence sends out ripples that begin to connect its diffuse citizens; her daughter, a young dangerously dreamy mother of two, an museum archivist and her 'complicated' partner, a secret, furious blogger whose supposedly secret posts are attracting global interest, and a bemused City risk analyst, each with problems, conflicting desires, joys and confusions of their own. The disappearance begins to implicate and involve them all. This is a novel about what it means to say you want 'the quiet life' in the modern world, about the contracts we enter -- love, marriages, houses and work, about community, nostalgia and neighbourliness.