This Vital Absence, Sophia Veltfort
This Vital Absence, Sophia Veltfort
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This Vital Absence
A Novel

Author: Sophia Veltfort

Narrator: Gail Shalan

Unabridged: TBD

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 12/01/2026

Synopsis

Seductive, unsettling, and impossible to put down, This Vital Absence is a novel about inheritance that transforms into an uneasy reckoning with the stories we tell to survive.Sylvia is the daughter of two loving mothers, but she has always wanted to know her father. When she moves back to New York City, a dossier arrives from her moms, with a new lead: Dean, an anesthesiologist who may bear some responsibility in the death of a pop star. At the same time, Sylvia meets Molly, a woman with her own family mysteries, with whom she makes a deal: they will help each other in the search for each other’s biological families. These three are drawn into a series of narrative games, games that leave Sylvia and Molly reeling and faced with a choice about the kinds of stories in which they are willing to participate. With the propulsive prose and psychological intensity of Patricia Highsmith, Veltfort probes questions of inheritance and intimacy, the allure of obsession, and misunderstandings that shape our lives.

About Sophia Veltfort

Sophia Veltfort’s fiction has appeared in Prairie Schooner, Writer’s Digest online, the Santa Monica Review, Narrative online, the Chicago Tribune online, Alaska Quarterly Review, and elsewhere. Her nonfiction has appeared in Harvard Review and been selected as a Notable Essay in the Best American Essays. After graduating from Yale, she studied on a Marshall Scholarship at Oxford and the University of East Anglia, then completed a Joint MFA / PhD at Cornell. She grew up in New York City with her two moms, three cats, and four avocado plants, and she currently teaches creative writing at Yale.

About Gail Shalan

Gail Shalan is a storyteller based in New York City. She has narrated books for Tantor, HighBridge, Blackstone, Chatterbox Audio with Audible UK, Spoken Realms, and more. She is also a narrator and producer on The StoryLight Podcast (available wherever you listen to podcasts). She holds an MFA in acting from the Bristol Old Vic Theatre School and has worked in both the US and UK in theater, film, and voice-over. Gail is also a puppeteer and one half of the International folk duo The Strange Bedfellows.

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Quotes

“This Vital Absence is a thrilling novel about the lengths to which a woman goes in order to satisfy her obsessive questions about her origins.” —Foreword Reviews“An intriguing novel about the limits of obsession and the perplexing ways in which people relate to each other.” —Kirkus Reviews“This Vital Absence is a brilliant Rubik’s Cube of a novel. It is about the stories we tell—and how those stories twist, reveal patterns, and come apart. Sophia Veltfort writes, thrillingly, out of the negative space from which obsession grows, exposing both the generative and the destructive power of longing. It is a debut like no other I’ve read before, full of piercing insights, bracing wit, and bold revelations into the crucial intimacies that define us. Utterly unforgettable.” —Emily Fridlund, author of History of Wolves“This Vital Absence, Sophia Veltfort’s incandescent first novel, is a laser-sharp, wised-up comedy about matters of utter seriousness. Centered around the search for an unknown father, the story sweeps us into a tsunami of questions about where we, as individual beings, originated, and how we’ve come to be who and what we are. Reading Sophia Veltfort’s book I knew, early on, that we’ve got a significant new novelist in our midst.” —Michael Cunningham, author of The Hours“This Vital Absence is both a deft metafiction and a moving meditation on fatherhood, daughterhood, and sisterhood.” —J. Robert Lennon, author of Buzz Kill

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