Events

This is a powerful debut novel about Lydia Pasternak, a precocious fifteen-year-old whose life—for better or worse—is irrevocably changed when her older brother, Danny, disappears. In the year following Danny's disappearance, his parents go off the rails, his town buzzes with self-indulgent mourning, and his little sister Lydia finds herself thrust into unwanted celebrity, forced to negotiate her complicated—often ambivalent —grief for a brother she never particularly liked but who is suddenly gone.  Embraced by Danny’s friends, forgotten by her parents, and drawn into the missing-person investigation by her family’s intriguing private eye, Lydia both blossoms and struggles to find herself during Danny’s absence. But when a trail of clues leads to a shocking outcome in her brother’s case, the teenaged Lydia and the adult she will become are forever changed, even as she reluctantly prepares to return to her hometown ten years later.  An honest look at how a crisis affects the daily life of one family in suburban America, The Local News is a haunting narrative that explores the complicated bond between siblings and proves that not all tragedies have a hero. Miriam Gershow graduated from the Program in Creative Writing at the University of Oregon and was a Fiction Fellow at the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing. Her stories have appeared in the Georgia Review, Black Warrior Review, and Quarterly West, among other literary journals. She lives in Eugene, Oregon, where she teaches in the English Department at The University of Oregon.