Elizabeth Is Missing

Elizabeth Is Missing is a novel by the English writer Emma Healey, published in 2014. Its narrator is Maud, an old woman whose memory is failing and who is trying to hold on to the thread of a question that matters to her.

Maud keeps buying peach slices when she already has a cupboard full of them, forgets to drink the cups of tea she has made, and writes notes to herself so that she will remember things. One of those notes is the title of the book, and she has no memory of writing it.

What she believes is that her friend Elizabeth has gone missing, and she is certain that nobody else is taking it seriously. Her attempts to raise the alarm are dismissed by the people around her, because she is the one who cannot remember what she had for lunch.

The novel sets the question of what has happened to Elizabeth against another disappearance, that of Maud's elder sister Sukey, which took place just after the war and was never solved. The book was adapted for television in 2019, with Glenda Jackson as Maud.