Jewell tells the story across multiple voices and multiple points in time in order to play with the reader’s expectations which are established by the first chapter from the perspective of missing Tallulah’s mother, Kim, and the impressions and assumptions generated from the findings of her informal investigation. The next chapter flashes forward to approximately fifteen months later when Sophie, who has just moved in to the boarding school where her boyfriend has just started as the head teacher, sees a sign nailed to the back fence, saying ‘dig here.’ Thus begins the unravelling of what actually happened to Tallulah. The opening chapter of The Night She Disappeared by Lisa Jewell poses just this question, introducing us to Kim, the mother of 19-year-old Tallulah, who tries, with an increasing sense of dread, to piece together where her 19-year-old daughter went when she doesn’t come home. But you know they would never disappear, that something terrible must have transpired. What would you do if someone you loved went out one night and never came back? No trace of them seems to be found, the people they were with say they set off for home, and there is nothing to dispute those claims.
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