Eight-year-old Clara, isolated by her distraught parents' efforts to protect her from the truth, is grief-stricken and bewildered. Liam Kane, newly divorced, newly unemployed, newly arrived in this small northern town, moves into the house next door and within hours gets a visit from the police.

As a seven-year-old girl watches for her missing sister, a stranger moves in next door and a neighbour's old secret starts to resurface...

In Solace, Northern Ontario, seven-year-old Clara waits at the window for her missing sister Rose.
Next door, Mrs Orchard's house stands empty, Until stranger Liam Kane arrives to claim the home she has left him in her will.

Clara sees Liam as an intruder. Liam, newly divorced and unemployed, has no idea why Mrs Orchard chose him.
In hospital, Elizabeth Orchard looks back over the decades, to the child she once loved and the mistake that shaped two families. As the truth about Rose begins to emerge, all three of them must decide how much of the past can be repaired.

Longlisted for the Booker Prize, A Town Called Solace is a tender, quietly suspenseful literary novel about a missing girl, small-town secrets, found family and the chance to change before it is too late.

'I've been telling everyone I know about Mary Lawson . . . Each of her novels is just a marvel' Anne Tyler
'Close to perfection' The Times
'Exquisitely poignant' Liane Moriarty
'Will break your heart' Graham Norton