What Is Missing

"A wise and necessary book, one I've been recommending ardently to everyone I know. " —Julie Orringer, author of The Flight Portfolio Suspenseful and gripping, award-winning author Michael Frank's What is Missing is a psychological family drama about a father, a son, and the woman they both love.Costanza Ansaldo, a half-Italian and half-American translator, is convinced that she has made peace with her childlessness. A year after the death of her husband, an eminent writer, she returns to the pensione in Florence where she spent many happy times in her youth, and there she meets, first, Andrew Weissman, an acutely sensitive seventeen-year-old, and, soon afterward, his father, Henry Weissman, a charismatic New York physician who specializes in—as it happens—reproductive medicine.With three lives each marked by heartbreak and absence—of a child, a parent, a partner, or a clear sense of...