Gone Girl

Judith Pond’s The Signs of No centres on a professor who spends her time thinking about her daughter, Stella. Rose lives with an unresolved grief: Stella vanished one day, at age eighteen, without a word. Now a cryptic postcard yields hope that she’s still alive, leaving Rose desperate to know where she has gone and, more important, why she left home in the first place. Rose wonders how she spent her life loving her daughter and still somehow missed the signs of “I can’t, I won’t, and you can’t make me. The signs of No.”

Two years after Stella’s disappearance, Rose is living in Calgary with her cat, Jeoffry, teaching at the local art school and writing about “the departures, the disappearances, the gaps that go unrecognized.” Moving through the world, she feels invisible, though she “doesn’t talk to herself; it just looks like she does, or it would, if anybody was looking, which nobody is.” Rose is lonely, but she accepts the ways she is viewed by...