The Department of Missing Persons

"Not for the faint of heart, The Department of Missing Persons is a heart-wrenching descent into the annals of human suffering and the aftershocks of devastation left in its wake. A brutal, yet poignant literary tapestry, it is a study of incomprehensible cruelty, but also, of love, compassion, and the ties that bind."—Nicole Dweck, bestselling author of The Debt of Tamar

"What does it mean to survive a massive world catastrophe like the Holocaust? Ruth Zylberman's moving novel shows that a violent past produces aftershocks that reach deep into the lives of the children and grandchildren of survivors, threatening to overwhelm their present. The missing persons of the title may well be the living, as well as the dead."—Marianne Hirsch, author of The Generation of Postmemory: Writing and Visual Culture After the Holocaust

"A shock . . . Can one make fiction of the unspeakable, the unnarrateable? . . . What is troubling in this novel is how Ruth Zylberman describes the degree to which this past interferes with her and her narrator's love life and even affects the walks she takes with her mother in the streets of Paris." —France Info

"Not for the faint of heart, The Department of Missing Persons is a heart-wrenching descent into the annals of human suffering and the aftershocks of devastation left in its wake. A brutal, yet poignant literary tapestry, it is a study of incomprehensible cruelty, but also, of love, compassion, and the ties that bind."—Nicole Dweck, bestselling author of The Debt of Tamar

"What does it mean to survive a massive world catastrophe like the Holocaust? Ruth Zylberman's moving novel shows that a violent past produces aftershocks that reach deep into the lives of the children and grandchildren of survivors, threatening to overwhelm their present. The missing persons of the title may well be the living, as well as the dead."—Marianne Hirsch, author of The Generation of Postmemory: Writing and Visual Culture After the Holocaust

"A shock . . . Can one make fiction of the unspeakable, the unnarrateable? . . . What is troubling in this novel is how Ruth Zylberman describes the degree to which this past interferes with her and her narrator's love life and even affects the walks she takes with her mother in the streets of Paris." —France Info