About this item

The moving and suspenseful new novel that Ann Patchett calls "smart and thrilling and impossible to put down... the book that every reader longs for.". "This summers undoubtable smash hit ... an addictive, heart-palpitating story." - Marie Claire. The sun is shining, the sea is blue, the children have disappeared. When Liv and Nora decide to take their husbands and children on a holiday cruise,everyone is thrilled. The adults are lulled by the ships comfort and ease. The fourchildren - ages six to eleven - love the nonstop buffet and their newfound independence.But when they all go ashore for an adventure in Central America, a series of minormisfortunes and miscalculations leads the families farther from the safety of the ship. Oneminute the children are there, and the next theyre gone. The disintegration of the world the families knew - told from the perspectives of both theadults and the children - is both riveting and revealing. The parents, accustomed tosecurity and control, turn on each other and blame themselves, while the seeminglyhelpless children discover resources they never knew they possessed. Do Not Become Alarmed is a story about the protective force of innocence and the limitsof parental power, and an insightful look at privileged illusions of safety. Celebrated forher spare and moving fiction, Maile Meloy has written a gripping novel about howquickly what we count on can fall away, and the way a crisis shifts our perceptions ofwhat matters most.



About the Author

Maile Meloy

MAILE MELOY is the author of three novels, two story collections, a middle-grade trilogy, and a picture book. Her fiction has also appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review and Best American Short Stories, and on Selected Shorts and This American Life. She has received The Paris Review's Aga Khan Prize for Fiction, the PEN/Malamud Award, the American Academy of Arts and Letters' Rosenthal Foundation Award, and a Guggenheim Fellowship.



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