I just finished this book I was led to I don't remember how. It was referenced somewhere in one of the many threads I follow online or in print or via podcast. I'm glad I read it. It had a particular kind of low hum of an ambiance that felt more life-like than a lot of the fiction stories I've read. The messages it imparts - about loss and faith and relationships - are there on the page on the surface or just below but they don't jump out at you and aren't hidden under layers of metaphor. It follows several threads in the aftermath of a Great Leaving - the sudden departure of a large number or residents of a suburban town in a kind of secular rapture. No one pretends to know why except for a small hardcore cult that grows out of the event and a priest that is convinced that it was the Christian rapture and he was left behind. The people we meet are familiar; caught midstream in their mundane struggles then suddenly confronted with the essential truth we all have to face one day. But in this case the mortality is thrust at them in an unexpected tidal wave of disappearances instead of the daily trickle we can nearly always comfortably ignore.