Get to know Sarah Sawyer

Sarah Sawyer is a high school English teacher at a boarding school in Western Massachusetts, where she lives with her husband and two children. She is a graduate of Amherst College and Middlebury's Bread Loaf School of English. The Undercurrent is her first novel.

Hometown

Easthampton, MA

Fun fact

I work at a boarding school...and I live in a dorm with my family PLUS 40 9th and 10th graders!

Favorite author

Too many to choose!

Favorite place in the world

Rome, Italy

Favorite place to read

On a flat, warm rock by a river

Books by Sarah Sawyer

The Undercurrent

Published October 8, 2024

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

Now featured in E! Fall Books of 2024

An overwhelmed new mother becomes obsessed with the unsolved disappearance of a young girl from her small Texas hometown—and unearths her own family’s dark secret.  

It’s 2011 and Deecie Jeffries’s missing person’s case in Austin, Texas, is still cold. New mom Bee, struggling with postpartum depression, is living in Portland, Maine, having left Austin–and those memories–far behind. Until Leo, her childhood crush and her estranged twin Gus’s best friend, suddenly resurfaces, drawing Bee back into their shared past. 

Bee’s predictable life is upended, pushing her to return to her childhood home and piece together a neighborhood’s shattered history. Bee becomes consumed with a need to uncover the truth about Deecie’s disappearance and what happened to the families who lived across the field from one another—Gus, Leo, and their mothers: Mary, a homemaker, whose only escape is the local community theater, and Diana, a serious academic dedicated to her studies.

Told in multiple perspectives with two different timelines, The Undercurrent is a gripping portrait of motherhood, obsession, broken family bonds, and buried secrets.
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The Undercurrent