The Never Ending

“The river I step in is not the river I stand in.”

When Liora, an Orthodox Jewish girl from Toronto, witnesses a traumatic event, she decides to leave the close-knit community behind and reinvent herself as Laura Haro. Over twenty years later, Laura is a successful journalist and the lead reporter on a story with international appeal: the abduction of five-year-old Missy Morgan from her front yard in Northern California.

The story goes viral, and Laura’s obsession with it threatens her relationships with her closest friend and editor Ray, her partner, Mark and her own daughter, Elisha. As she gets closer to discovering the identity of Missy’s abductor, she grapples with the pain of her past, including her absentee father and the mysterious disappearance of her Uncle M years ago. Laura’s pursuit of the story will lead her back to the scene of her earliest trauma, forcing her to acknowledge how her choices have reverberated through time indefinitely—a cycle she believes she can stop if only she can find this one precious little girl alive.

Leah Eichler's The Never Ending is a beautifully written novel about "the human heart in conflict with itself," as William Faulkner once put it. It is about the search for identity in a world that yields few answers, or at least few answers that are acceptable or satisfying. It is also a crime novel, a mystery, and the mystery itself serves to reflect the turmoil in its protagonist's—Laura's—heart. What a brilliant debut!

Joseph Kertes, Award-Winning Author of Last Impressions and The Afterlife of Stars