UNSEEN

A missing girl. Four neighbours. The lives they have been quietly hiding from themselves.

On a Tuesday evening in September, the residents of Southshore Crescent, Leigh-on-Sea, are woken by blue lights. Sixteen-year-old Robyn Ames has not come home from school. The police are at her door. And the street - which has always managed to be simultaneously close and entirely separate - will never quite be the same again.

This is not a thriller. It is something quieter, and perhaps more unsettling: a novel about the people who lived beside the Ames family and who, in the months following Robyn's disappearance, find themselves unable to look away from their own lives any longer.

Cara, twenty-nine, has real artistic talent and a spare room full of canvases she has spent four years turning to face the wall. She checks the Facebook search group for Robyn every evening instead of picking up a brush, because the group feels like company and the blank canvas feels like judgement.

Diane, fifty-two, left a career of genuine promise to raise her children - a decision she does not regret - but in returning to work she accepted far less than she was capable of, and buried the appraisal that proved it in a box under her son's bed, where it has been sitting for sixteen years.

Marcus, fifty-one, is professionally accomplished and personally hollowed out. He has lived on the street for two and a half years without learning a single neighbour's name. He has made his life so efficiently managed, so frictionless, that there is almost no one left inside it.

Danny, thirty-one, is generous to the point of self-erasure. He works too much, charges too little, and comes home too late. He loves the woman he lives with and is slowly running out of ways to show it.

The investigation into Robyn's disappearance continues in the background of all their lives - present, unresolved, a question the street has learned to carry. And as the seasons turn from September through to the following summer, these four ordinary people begin, haltingly and imperfectly, to close the gap between the life they are living and the life they might choose.

Set against the extraordinary backdrop of the Thames Estuary - the vast tidal mudflats of Old Leigh, the cockle sheds, the fog horns in the January dark, the pale light of a June evening on the water - Unseen is a novel about proximity and isolation, about ordinary courage, and about what it costs to finally stop hiding.