RED RIDING HOOD The Letter from the Wolf

For readers of literary family mysteries, emotionally precise women’s fiction, and book club fiction.

Her father did not vanish. He was edited out.

At fifty-three, Rose Hood has become skilled at living beside loss: an ageing mother in Moscow, a grown son pulling away, a career quietly reducing her to “institutional memory”, and a city that keeps people company without offering comfort.

Then a worn parcel arrives at her Buenos Aires apartment: photographs, tram tickets, old receipts, and a file marked with her name. Inside is a version of her childhood that does not match the one she was taught to survive.

As Rose follows the trail through archives, railway stations, forgotten apartments and the neighbourhood where her father may have lived within reach, her mother begins to forget the only facts that might still matter. The family story is collapsing from both ends: the documents are speaking, and the witness is disappearing.

Dry, atmospheric and unsentimental, The Archive of Absence is a literary mystery about memory, family secrets, late-life reckoning, and the stories families rewrite in order to survive.