#Titanuary ‘The Vanishing Year’ by Kate Moretti

About the book…

Zoe Whittaker is living a charmed life: wife to a handsome Wall Street trader, with the perfect penthouse and summer home, she is the new member of Manhattan’s social elite.

What no one knows is that five years ago, Zoe’s life was in danger.

Back then, Zoe wasn’t Zoe at all. Now her secrets are coming back to haunt her.

As the past and present collide, Zoe must decide who she can trust before she—whoever she is—vanishes completely.

First published by Titan in 2016, ‘The Vanishing Year’ is a stunning debut where you can have everything that you ever wanted, as long as you hide from the truth.

Zoe is married to a man with wealth and power, a year where she has carved out her identity as a wife, a co-ordinator of a charity that helps underprivileged children, no one at the benefit she stages would have a clue that this cause is close to her heart because of what she went through, in another lifetime, under another name.

A meeting with a photographer to beg him not to publish any pictures of her in the article accompanying her charity function, leads her to disclosing that she is adopted, a foundling baby abandoned at a hospital, brought up never really owning her own name or family.

After the woman she knows as her mother dies, circumstances bring her into the circle of a local drug dealer, and quickly becomes embroiled in a situation that is much worse than casual drug taking and selling. It leads her to abandon the name she was given, her past, and go into hiding.

But now, caught between past and present, with a husband who cannot understand why he is not enough for her, why she has to track down her birth mother, Zoe needs to not only reclaim her past, but also face what is hiding in the shadows. The vanished year, when she has been married to financier Henry has , unknowingly, replaced her yet again. Her identity, her desires, are all dictated by other people,

If she is to truly start over and reconcile the three lives she has lived this far, coming clean could just about get her killed….

In her debut novel, Kate Moretti has created the first of her memorable female protagonists. None of the things which Zoe has been through seems too coincidental to actually have happened, the story is tempered with a reality which engages the reader and leaves them wanting more.

Zoe’s actions are entirely understandable, not that she made great choices but in the respect of her upbringing. And it makes sense that she would grab the opportunity to remake herself, yet in her courtship with Henry, she seems to have lost herself. This is a universal theme, how people lose and also find themselves within the context of a relationship, or a marriage. They become both more and less than the sum of their parts, however, in  this instance, Zoe seems to have given up one hell of a lot more than he has, and you find yourself rooting for Zoe to lay several ghosts to rest, to reclaim her sense of self and fight back against the lack of identity that she feels she has been burdened with.

A really great, thrilling novel of self reflection and redemption, this is the third of Kate’s books from Titan which I have read, and I am hopeful that there will be more forthcoming, I am a huge fan!

About the author…