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Written by Jacquelyn Mitchard - Audio book performed by Dana Ivey - Abridged Fiction - 2 CASSETTES - 3 hours

Publisher, Penguin Audiobooks (March 1999)

The printed edition of this title is an Oprah's Book Club Selection!

"Burns itself into the memory line by line. It is by turns lyrical and startling, brilliant. I wish I had written it. Ms. Mitchard is blessed with a surplus of talent." —Kaye Gibbons

"Wonderful...ordinary people caught in the most extraordinary circumstances...once you start reading you will never stop." —Judith Viorst

"Watch your brother," says Beth Cappadora to her seven-year-old son, Vincent. She's checking in at her high school reunion in Chicago. Even with a hotel clerk who is, in Beth's estimation, slower than weight loss, it's not more than five minutes before she turns again and asks, "Where's Ben?" It's the moment every mother dreads. Three-year-old Ben is gone. And no one can find him. Despite a police search that will turn into a nation-wide obsession, Ben has vanished, seemingly without a trace. His disappearance will leave Beth frozen on a knife-edge of suppressed agony for nine years and drive a shattering wedge through her marriage to Pat - who, though he is a man of consummate kindness, can do nothing to bring his boy back. It will transform their other son, Vincent, into a delinquent who courts danger in an attempt to break the bell jar of silence that surrounds the whole Cappadora family. Then, just after the Cappadoras move back to Chicago to help start a family restaurant, something so unexpected happens, it changes everything that once seemed true or possible. And perhaps, only perhaps, it will give Beth what she thought was gone forever: a reason to live.