The Undercurrent
Sarah Sawyer
Meet the author
Sarah Sawyer
Sarah Sawyer is an English teacher at a boarding school in western Massachusetts. She is a graduate of Amherst College and the Bread Loaf School of English, and lives in Easthampton, Massachusetts, with her family. The Undercurrent is her first novel.
What people are saying...
"The Undercurrent is a mystery of remarkable scope, bristling with intelligence, beauty, and humanity. It is, quite simply: stunning."
Gillian Flynn
author of Gone Girl
"A stunning, achingly beautiful and gripping mystery. Full of page-turning suspense, intrigue and secrets, The Undercurrent is also a heartfelt story of family, childhood and the nature of obsession. I loved it.”
Chris Whitaker
author of All the Colors of the Dark
“Brilliant… I read The Undercurrent like I was under a spell, accompanied only by my own goosebumps. It’s a book about being a mother—in all the dull, punishing, and stunning ways—but then there’s also a … chilling mystery at its core. Pure glinty, flinty, propulsive perfection.”
Catherine Newman
author of We All Want Impossible Things
“With The Undercurrent, Sarah Sawyer puts a spell on her reader. The story is immersive and taut, with an increasing sense of unease that kept me turning the pages. I wanted to know what happened next because of the mystery at the center of the book but also because I came to care deeply for these characters—a testament to Sawyer’s lyrical and tender depiction of them. I read the last chapters with my heart in my throat. Readers of Tana French will love this literary page turner.”
Kate Hope Day
author of In the Quick
"Sarah Sawyer takes us on a gorgeous, twisting voyage through a shadowed landscape of memory and mystery. The Undercurrent truly carried me away. This is a shimmering debut."
Debra Jo Immergut
author of You Again
Why Zibby Loves It
Sarah tells an unforgettable story of how one small town is rocked by the disappearance of a young girl and how the reverberations of that one event changed everyone’s lives around her. It’s also, really, about one’s own reckoning with the past, the friends you keep, sibling relationships, neighborly envy and misunderstanding, female ambition and homemaking, and how to process a trauma with no clear resolution. Motherhood and friendship are the two backbones of this story, rocks in the current.