About the Book

Buenos Aires, 1976. Lorena Ledesma is a housewife with dangerous secrets living under Argentina’s rising military dictatorship. When she and her husband are torn from their home by the paramilitary late one night, their two-year-old son is left behind with Lorena’s mother, Esme. There’s no record of the arrest.

Desperate to locate Lorena, Esme joins an underground group of mothers who are investigating the disappearances of their own missing children. In attempts to break the ominous silence imposed by the junta, the mothers don white headscarves and hold vigils in the Plaza de Mayo, risking their safety and freedom. Amidst tanks and armed guards, the women display photos of their missing children, demanding to know their whereabouts. But when the mothers make the devastating discovery that several of their kidnapped daughters – including Lorena – have given birth to babies inside clandestine prisons and that the babies are being given up for adoption by the government, a new kind of pursuit begins: the search for their stolen grandchildren.

Nearly three decades later, thousands of miles away, adoptee Rachel Sprague is confronted with the possibility that she may have a biological brother—but the truth is far more complicated than the results of a DNA test. Revealing her natural identity will require Rachel to expose painful family secrets that put her loved ones in jeopardy, and she must find a way to uncover the truth of her past without being consumed by it.

Selected as the winner of the Women’s Fiction Writers Association Rising Star Award, The Disappeared is a moving debut inspired by historical events of Argentina’s ‘dirty war’ and the real-life work of the Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo, a group of extraordinary women who risked everything in pursuit of truth, justice, and love of family.