Ladder of Years

Ladder of Years is a novel by Anne Tyler, published in 1995. Its central character, Delia Grinstead, is forty years old and on holiday with her family when she disappears.

She is last seen strolling down the Delaware shore in nothing more than a bathing suit, carrying a beach tote with five hundred dollars tucked inside. Her husband and her three almost-grown children have no explanation for it, and the newspaper accounts describe her as a woman who has vanished without trace or reason.

For Delia the decision is neither planned nor simply a rejection of the people she has left. She has felt like a tiny gnat buzzing around the edges of her own family, and walking away is what she does about that feeling rather than a solution to it.

The novel follows her as she enters the workforce, finds somewhere to live and works out what matters most to her, and it is concerned with a woman who has to build an identity rather than recover one.