Nan and her four-year-old granddaughter Jane are taking their first airplane trip together, flying from Seattle to the East Coast. But this is no ordinary excursion. Nan is abducting Jane.

Nan's own daughter, Alex, believes Jane's father has been sexually abusing her, and she's asked Nan to take her away, to hide her. But when she and Jane arrive in Providence, Rhode Island, things begin to go wrong. The old friend whom Nan expected to stay with has vanished. Her son-in-law is on her trail. And Alex disappears.

"I'm too old for this!" Nan thinks, in furious, self-pitying despair. She wasn't a good wife; she wasn't a good mother. Now she's stranded in a strange city, without friends or money or even her own identity, in sole charge of a very unhappy little girl. When her new life offers new friends, new work, and even a new lover, she must decide whom to trust.

The Year She Disappeared explores the possibility—and the price—of late blooming love. Will the trials Nan faces during her year on the lam break her? Or will she discover who she really is?

Ann Harleman is the author of Happiness, a collection of short stories that won the Iowa Short Fiction Award; Bitter Lake, a novel; and Thoreau's Laundry: Stories. Among her awards are Guggenheim and Rockefeller fellowships, the PEN Syndicated Fiction Award, the O. Henry Award, and a Rona Jaffe Writer's Award. She is a member of the faculties of Brown University and the Rhode Island School of Design.