The End of Everything

In a placid 1980s suburb in the Midwest, thirteen-year old Lizzie and her next door neighbor Evie Verver are inseparable, best friends who swap bathing suits and field-hockey sticks and between whom, presumably, there are no secrets. Together they live in the shadow of Evie’s glamorous older sister Dusty, who provides them a window on the exotic, intoxicating possibilities on their own teenage horizons. To Lizzie, the Verver household, presided over by Evie’s big-hearted father, is the world’s most perfect place.

And then, one afternoon, Evie disappears. The only clue: a maroon sedan Lizzie spotted driving past the two girls earlier in the day. As a rabid, giddy panic spreads through the balmy suburban community, everyone turns to Lizzie for answers. Was Evie unhappy, troubled, upset? Had she mentioned being followed? Would she have gotten into the car of a stranger? Would Evie have gotten into a car with a man?

Compelled by curiosity and a desire to rescue the enchanted Verver household from ruin, Lizzie takes up her own furtive pursuit of the truth. Her days spent with a shell-shocked Mr. Verver, she devotes her nights to prowling through backyards, peering through windows, pushing herself to the dark center of Evie’s world. Haunted by dreams of her lost friend and titillated by her own new power as the center of the disappearance, Lizzie uncovers secret after secret and begins to wonders if she knew anything about her best friend at all.

Praise

The End of Everything makes Boston Globe’s 10 Best Crime Books of the Year, Publisher's Weekly Best Books of 2011, and the Washington Examiner’s Best Books of 2011

“Anything but typical... deftly skirt[s] the familiar 'adolescent girl as victim' scenario and explor[es], instead, the power games that young women engage in with much older men... games in which there are unwritten rules and exquisite danger for all who play.”
— The Boston Globe

“Abbott offers a mournful, Marianne Faithfull-like song to the dark, unidentifiable urges of adolescence, with roots that go so, so deep... It lifts Megan Abbott to a new level as a writer of crime fiction and of literature...and will stay with you no matter how much it hurts to remember.”
— January Magazine

 “Already being compared to The Virgin Suicides (and, for once, rightly so). ...Dreamy, shimmering, enthralling.”
— Marie Claire (UK)

“Megan Abbott captures the essence of being thirteen—all its magic, its intensity and confusion, its headlong power and its terrible vulnerability—and wraps it in a story that’s taut, unflinching and very hard to put down.”
— Tana French, In the Woods and The Likeness

 “With The End of Everything, Megan Abbott takes an insightful, sensuous coming-of-age tale and ties it to a freight train of a mystery. The result is a novel that’s bold, unnerving, poignant and full of yearning--like that first teenage year itself.”
— Gillian Flynn, Dark Places and Sharp Objects