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Karen Joy Fowler’s latest novel, which has not only earned her a place on the Man Booker Prize shortlist, but also won her the 2014 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, revolves around a striking twist that occurs relatively early on in its narrative. This twist becomes the central conceit from which the story of We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves flows. Fowler takes a risk in building her entire novel on one particularly daring narrative move. Thankfully, she manages to pull it off, and what follows is an intriguing and heartfelt story, told with simplicity and honesty.

When Rosemary Cooke was five years old, her sister, Fern, disappeared. In the years that followed, her brother Lowell too would leave home, never to return. Now at college, and effectively an only child, Rosemary finds she must work back through her own memories, repressed and corrupted by time, in order to make sense of her unusual childhood, and to figure out what exactly happened to her siblings, and what her role in their disappearance was.

We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves is not lyrical or poetic in style. The writing is grounded, to the point, and ultimately highly readable. It serves the forward movement of the narrative, and efficiently too. However, where the writing itself lacks flourish, the structure of the storytelling seems to make haphazard attempts at it. There are regular jumps in time, both forward and backward, in Rosemary’s telling of her story, which, though they seem to be deliberate stylistic choices, actually come across rather untidily. At times, there is a sense of Fowler taking some slight liberties with her readers in her role as storyteller, by clumsily withholding, and then later divulging bits of the story. That said, while storytelling is less than first-rate, the story is original enough to keep the pages turning.