Sycamore

Sycamore is a novel by the American writer Bryn Chancellor, published in 2017. It is both a mystery and a coming-of-age story about a town.

The book opens with a discoverer: a newcomer to Sycamore, Arizona, is out hiking on a scorching afternoon and comes upon what look like human remains embedded in the wall of a dry desert ravine.

As news of the find travels through the town, the people who have lived there a long time fear that the bones are those of Jess Winters, a teenage girl who disappeared suddenly some eighteen years before. The case was never solved, and it has soaked into the town the way water soaks into its porous rock.

In the days it takes the authorities to identify the remains, the residents bring out their stories, their rumours and their memories of Jess and of her difficult history, and the novel moves between them. What the town finds in its own past turns out to be clarity, an unexpected possibility and a way forward, and Jess herself, a thoughtful and promising girl on the edge of adulthood, is at the middle of all of it.