Jewell's novel explores the space between going missing and being lost. Alice Lake, a single mother of three, has a soft spot for strays and a history of bad judgment. So when she encounters a handsome stranger on the beach - a man who claims to have no memory of who he is or how he got there - she takes him home to her cottage on the British coast and calls him "Frank." Meanwhile, in a London suburb, a young Ukrainian woman, freshly married after a whirlwind courtship and new to the country, is searching for her missing husband, an Englishman old enough to be her father. A third story line unfolds more than 20 years earlier and centers on a teenage boy, on holiday with his family, who becomes alarmed when a handsome stranger takes an interest in his sister. How these three plots intersect and finally collide is one of the great thrills of reading Jewell's book. She ratchets up the tension masterfully, and her writing is lively. A cottage has "nicotine beige" walls. A view through a window consists of "a necklace of fat white lights, and beyond that the silvery shadows of the sea." Alice is particularly winning: vulnerable and funny and self-aware. Inviting an amnesiac home for dinner with the kids can, of course, be awkward: "The four of them standing around eating pizza with a big scared man in a teenager's hoodie. Hard to know what to say really."