Fiction Pick of the Week: Absent

Absent by Sherri Vanderveen 2009

In 1979 Otto Sinclair abruptly leaves his home and his family after a fire is started in his mother’s home where he and his family were living. Twenty-eight years later he comes back to them. His wife Lenore remarried yet she kept a box of memories of her time with Otto in the trunk of her car. He daughter Ruby has a box of newspaper clippings about heroic fathers. Otto’s son Gavin does not remember his father as he was four when his father disappeared. The entire family has been scarred by Otto’s betrayal. I liked this story for the strong character development and the ways that this family survived and tried to understand what their father did to them.