Where You Can Find Me

Finalist for the 2014 Townsend Award and the Ferro-Grumley Award

A searing exploration of a family’s struggle to heal in the wake of unthinkable tragedy

A week after his eleventh birthday, Caleb Vincent vanishes with hardly a trace. After a three-year search, he is found living a seemingly normal life under a new name with a man he calls his father.

While outwardly stunned with joy at his safe recovery, Caleb's parents and sister are privately scrambling to gather together the pieces of a shattered family. To escape the relentless media attention surrounding her son’s return, Caleb’s mother, Marlene, decides to flee the country and seek refuge in Costa Rica with Caleb and his younger sister, against her estranged husband's wishes. There Marlene forms a makeshift household with her husband’s expat mother and his charming, aimless older brother, all residing in a broken-down hotel perched at the blustery apex of the continental divide. In the clouds of their new home, the mystery of Caleb’s time gone unfolds while new dangers threaten to pull him back toward his former life.

Where You Can Find Me, a darkly incandescent novel that progresses with page-turning suspense, is sure to establish award-winning author Sheri Joseph as a household name.

Praise for Where You Can Find Me

"Joseph (Stray, 2007) turns the sensationalistic story of an abused boy who has seen the darkest parts of life into a transformative and often suspense-filled tale of identity and resilience. A deeply moving novel about a family determined to survive the greatest of tragedies."

--Booklist (starred)

"A fraught subject, handled with gravitas and, improbably, grace."

--Kirkus Reviews

“Sheri Joseph (Bear Me Safely Over, Stray) takes this darker than dark scenario and transforms it into a searching, layered investigation…The strength of her novel lies in precisely this generosity and grace, a willingness to turn their strange prism of experience a hundred ways until, unexpectedly, it finally reveals a glimmer of hope.”

--The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

“This is an intense read, well worth it.”

--Suspense Magazine

“All seems to be well, but one mark of a good writer is the ability to hint at the disquiet beneath what looks like a calm surface. Like Hilda’s old hotel, part of it fallen into the valley and the rest teetering on the edge of a cliff, the reader is kept in a state of almost nail-biting uncertainty when it comes to this family’s recovery. In Where You Can Find Me, Joseph takes on a difficult subject and makes it work.”

--Bookpage

“Joseph writes about the disappearance of a child with grace and complexity…Where You Can Find Me doesn’t explain the unexplainable, but instead opens us to a complicated world of pain and love and mystery, a world that we both know and can never know.”

--FictionWritersReview.com

“With compassion and profound psychological insight, Sheri Joseph follows one family through the aftermath of every parent’s worst nightmare . . . . Suspenseful, beautifully written and utterly convincing, Where You Can Find Me is hard to put down and impossible to forget.”

--Jennifer Haigh, New York Times bestselling author of Faith, Mrs. Kimble, Baker Towers and The Condition

In Where You Can Find Me, Sheri Joseph has written an engrossing, deeply moving, and emotionally complex novel that has stayed with me every moment since I first read it, months ago. Joseph writes swift and faultless prose and miraculously real characters. This book spurs you to pay close attention to those around you and to love as fully in this life as you possibly can.

--Lauren Groff, author of Arcadia and The Monsters of Templeton

“What a gorgeous writer! Sheri Joseph's prose is reminiscent of Michael Cunningham's, brave, compassionate, as clear and artful as blown glass. What is most shocking is not the devastation wrought on Caleb Vincent and his family but the grace with which they manage to grow into their new selves. I did not want Where You Can Find Me to end, but the climax is so gripping--and terrifying--I tore through the pages.”

--Susan Rebecca White, author of A Soft Place to Land and Bound South

"Where You Can Find Me is a tender, ticking bomb. Joseph's haunting novel of lost innocence and second chances is both terrifying and indelible, and will leave you clutching your family close."

--Alexi Zentner, author of Touch

“Where You Can Find Me is a vivid, page-turning thriller about a terrible crime, and the way one fractured family puts itself back together in the aftermath. Beautifully told, with indelible characters, this novel is full of wisdom about the darkness of the world, and the power we have to survive it.”

--Alix Ohlin, author of The Missing Person and Babylon and Other Stories

“In the mesmerizing and disturbing Where You Can Find Me, Sheri Joseph implicates the reader in a journey to the darkest corners of the soul as she explores the aftermath of horror for a teenage boy and his family. Yet all is not dark; the complex and vibrant characters find ample opportunity for surprising beauty. What happens in the present is as gripping as the mystery of the past, and Joseph creates a delicate balance of uncertainty and hope that carries us through to the piercing final pages."

--Scott Heim, author of Mysterious Skin and We Disappear






STRAY

Winner of the Grub Street National Book Prize, Stray is a riveting psychological portrait of Kent, a young musician who is torn between his Mennonite wife, Maggie, and his ex-lover, Paul. When Kent and Paul rekindle their affair, Paul becomes obsessed with Kent’s marriage. And when he pushes too close, a tragedy binds these three characters uncomfortably and irrevocably together.

Praise for Stray—
"a fearless examination of the myriad deeds and relationships love inhabits" (The Missouri Review)

"If the plot makes you want to speed through the book, the descriptions will make you want to slow down...Joseph offers a realistic, if grim, perspective on the risks we take when we succumb to that most human weakness--desire." (The Believer)

"Joseph's potent tale of sexual deception and emotional redemption is a seductive stew of love story and murder mystery about three fundamentally fine, and gratifyingly complex, people." (San Francisco Bay Guardian)



BEAR ME SAFELY OVER

Shifting between the wraparound porches and horse barns of rural Greene County and the seductive sidewalks of urban Athens, Sheri Joseph's remarkably assured debut explores the interior lives of two Georgia families soon to be linked by a marriage. This cycle of stories tackles dark themes -- a young daughter dying of AIDS, the menace of homophobia, the splintering of families, the discordant voice of religious fundamentalism -- but at its core it is a hopeful portrait of the different and often elusive faces of salvation. Summoning a diverse and provocative chorus of voices, Bear Me Safely Over offers up a kaleidoscopic vision of the common secrets and sorrows at the heart of a community that will have readers looking at all relationships with new eyes.

Praise for Bear Me Safely Over—
"A gutsy, realistic and lyrical portrait of country people struggling to find meaning in their constricted lives...An affecting narrative that explores the way people accept or reject the responsibilities of nurturing and love" (Publishers Weekly)

"[Joseph] embeds the pleasure of a romance novel within this very literary effort. An old-fashioned family drama made...relatively new by the complicating factors of stepfamily, gay liberation and rock'n'roll." (The New York Times Book Review)

"Joseph is a distinctive voice: fearless, critical, and yet ultimately full of hope...She has the potential to join the front ranks of Southern writers." (Lexington Herald-Leader)


Saturday, April 20, 2013

Book Launch!

Thanks to everyone who came out to the book launch this week, kindly hosted by the Georgia Center for the Book.  WHERE YOU CAN FIND ME is out in the world, available in hardcover and all e-book formats.  By April 30, there should be an audiobook, too.
Signing line

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Friday, March 1, 2013

A starred review in Booklist!

Since you have to be a subscriber to access Booklist online, here's the text of their (STARRED!) review of Where You Can Find Me:

Issue: March 1, 2013
Where You Can Find Me.
Joseph, Sheri (Author)
Apr 2013. 336 p. St. Martin's/Thomas Dunne, hardcover, $24.99. (9781250012852).
Caleb Vincent, kidnapped at age 11 by a violent pedophile, is miraculously returned to his stunned family three years later. His mother, Marlene, who has been utterly consumed with looking for him, decides to flee the paparazzi staked out in front of their house and take him to Costa Rica, where her mother-in-law runs a wildlife preserve. His father is guilt-stricken because he had given his son up for dead, while Caleb’s 11-year-old sister, Lark, thinks of her brother as having been to “The Gone: Dorothy up in the tornado; Alice down the rabbit hole.” At the heart of the story is shell-shocked Caleb, who now feels like damaged goods and finds himself still drawn to the man he thought of as his father. In the exotic environment of Costa Rica, where no one knows his backstory and where his bohemian uncle forges a light and easy relationship with him, Caleb is finally able to begin to understand just what has happened. Joseph (Stray, 2007) turns the sensationalistic story of an abused boy who has seen the darkest parts of life into a transformative and often suspense-filled tale of identity and resilience. A deeply moving novel about a family determined to survive the greatest of tragedies.
— Joanne Wilkinson
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Saturday, September 29, 2012

Here's the cover of the new book:

The novel takes place largely in the cloud forest of Costa Rica, the Monteverde area.  Pictured are the two major child characters, Lark in the foreground and, walking away, her older brother Caleb.  If you look closely you can see that Caleb is a bit ethereal, not quite there, disappearing.  The surrounding clouds make a convenient medium in which to disappear, but the novel is also a ghost story. 

So this is really the design for the ARC, which should be printed any day now.  Look for the actual published book in April of 2013.
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Saturday, July 14, 2012

News for 2012

I'm thrilled to announce that the new novel, WHERE YOU CAN FIND ME, will be published in 2013 by Thomas Dunne Books/St. Martin's Press.  The pub date, so they tell me, is April 19.  The story concerns a child abduction and is set in the cloud forest of Costa Rica. 

The book is now in editing, headed toward page proofs, and the designers are coming up with some interesting images for the cover.  So exciting!   I'll post the cover when there's a definite one.
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Sunday, April 17, 2011

News for 2011

My latest novel, which was awarded a 2010 NEA grant, has recently been completed.  I'll post here when I have some publication news.

In the meantime, check out this fabulous spread from the February issue of Vanity Fair, in which I appear with some local literary luminaries.  http://www.vanityfair.com/culture/features/2011/02/literary-belles-201102
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