Loved and Missed [Paperback]

With her daughter in the throes of drug addiction, a mother takes over the care of her granddaughter—and is transformed by the bond that forms between them—in this warm, sharp-witted, and psychologically acute story of familial love by a praised British novelist.

Ruth is a woman who believes in and despairs of the curative power of love. Her daughter, Eleanor, who is addicted to drugs, has just had a baby, Lily. Ruth adjusts herself in ways large and small to give to Eleanor what she thinks she may need—nourishment, distance, affection—but all her gifts fall short. After someone dies of an overdose in Eleanor's apartment, Ruth hands her daughter an envelope of cash and takes Lily home with her, and Lily, as she grows, proves a compensation for all of Ruth's past defeats and disappointment. Love without fear is a new feeling for her, almost unrecognizable. Will it last? 

Love and Missed is a whip-smart, incisive, and mordantly witty novel about love's gains and missteps. British writer Susie Boyt's seventh novel, and the first to be published in the United States, is a triumph.“If my tattered and heavily annotated copy of Loved and Missed serves as a harbinger, Boyt has written a 21st-century classic.... Boyt, an acute student of Henry James’s fiction, creates an interlocking series of narratives that is not reducible to the so-called “trauma plot”. No single memory or cluster of memories explains why Ruth feels “smashed up” at the novel’s outset. Instead, Loved and Missed tracks the shambolic emergence of Ruth’s past within the present-tense narrative, and, in the process, raises as many questions as it answers—particularly regarding her relationship with Eleanor.” —Eric Gudas,