Every Visible Thing (2006)

When a teenage boy disappears, what happens to the family left behind? In prose that blossoms like a bruise, both aching and vivid, Lisa Carey (Love in the Asylum) limns the splintered lives of the aptly named Fureys: parents Elizabeth and Henry, who can't face the fact that their oldest, favored son is missing (and, five years on, most likely dead), and their two other kids, 10-year-old Owen and 15-year-old Lena, curdling unnoticed in their own grief and resentment. Lena's immersion in Boston's chaotic street-punk scene is expertly drawn, but it is Owen's foray into sexuality that's most heartbreaking and, ultimately, redemptive in Every Visible Thing.