What Is Missing

A wise and necessary book one I’ve been recommending ardently to everyone I know. —Julie Orringer author of The Flight PortfolioSuspenseful and gripping award-winning author Michael Frank’s What is Missing is a psychological family drama about a father a son and the woman they both love.Costanza Ansaldo a half-Italian and half-American translator is convinced that she has made peace with her childlessness. A year after the death of her husband an eminent writer she returns to the pensione in Florence where she spent many happy times in her youth and there she meets first Andrew Weissman an acutely sensitive seventeen-year-old and soon afterward his father Henry Weissman a charismatic New York physician who specializes in—as it happens—reproductive medicine.With three lives each marked by heartbreak and absence—of a child a parent a partner or a clear sense of identity—What is Missing offers Costanza Andrew and Henry the opportunity to make themselves whole when the triangle resumes three months later in New York where the relationships among them turn and tighten with combustive effects that cut to the core of what it means to be a father a son and—for Costanza—a potential mother.