The Van Apfel Girls Are Gone

Felicity McLean is an author and journalist. She has ghostwritten six books, most recently Body Lengths, co-written with Olympian Leisel Jones, which was awarded Apple iBooks' 'Best Biography' and a Reader's Choice Award at the Australian Book Industry Awards (ABIA).

The Van Apfel Girls Are Gone is her debut novel.

"McLean peels back the layers of one scorching Australian summer, revealing the dark secrets and lies hidden behind the cheerful facade of suburbia. This debut, part coming-of-age story and part crime thriller, is both forceful and unnerving."
--Publishers Weekly

"The story is a compelling one, with a nice layer of suspense that keeps the pages turning until its hauntingly melancholy end."
--Booklist

"A wry, sad coming-of-age story and a well-crafted first novel."
--Kirkus Reviews

"Containing summer friendships, whispered secrets, and a dark, hidden truth, Felicity McLean's The Van Apfel Girls Are Gone is poignant and jarring . . . a blazingly well-written, impressive, and deeply satisfying thriller."
--Foreword Reviews, starred review

"An intriguing, charge-ahead work with real pathos at its center."
--Library Journal

"A taut, beautifully written thriller with a scorching expansive setting. The Van Apfel Girls Are Gone is a fantastic debut and a story that lingers."
--Lisa Ballantyne, author of Everything She Forgot

"I deeply admire the languid, lived-in prose of Felicity McLean's lovely novel The Van Apfel Girls Are Gone. This is a story as much about forgiving ourselves our own childhoods, as it is about acknowledging and embracing the people we've become because of those adolescent (and sometimes life altering) choices."
--Hannah Pittard, author of Visible Empire

"Engrossing and goosebumpy from start to finish, this novel about three young sisters who vanish all together one night has the chilling feel of true events that are stranger than fiction, and the stuff of nightmares. But the magic of McLean's art is not just her gift for evoking, in almost hallucinogenic detail, her haunted narrator's childhood--a time and place linked to Australia's notorious true-life story of a baby dragged off in the night by a wild animal--but to do so in the most charming and irresistible of narrative voices. The result is a novel that is as delightful as it is terrifying, and just scary good."
--Tim Johnston, bestselling author of Descent and The Current

"A smart, classy thriller that blazes with the heat of Australia and slowly reveals its many layers." --Fiona Mozley, author of Elmet, 2017 Man Booker Prize finalist

"A smart debut. Beautifully atmospheric with its great sense of time and place." --Melina Marchetta, author of On the Jellicoe Road

"McLean expertly maintains an air of suspense as the tragedy unfolds. Tikka is an unforgettable, if not entirely reliable, narrator full of black humour, brutal honesty and naive curiosity. This novel is one that will haunt readers long after they have turned the last page."
--Books+Publishing (Australia)

"How do you escape your childhood, emotionally, actually? This compelling mystery by Felicity McLean has a rare depth of psychological and emotional truth. It will engage your heart."
--Delia Ephron, New York Times bestselling author of Siracusa