The body of a young boy is found floating in a river, with little to identify him other than pollen in his lungs from what has to be some warm green valley distant from the city in which he has turned up dead. Who is he? How is it that he came so far, only to meet this fate?
A medical anthropologist, and her assistant and fixer – who is also her husband – are tasked with investigating the boy’s origins and migrations; then they are thwarted when they begin to discover too much. Science and ghosts are on one side with them; politics, fatalism, and forgetting are on the other. The investigators persist.
“Part ghost story, part scientific disquisition, and part political intrigue, Not Long Ago Persons Found is a gripping, Borgesian allegory of our futile attempts to see between things—between peoples, places, and ‘through gaps in the trees’—in order to find truth and meaning in a world that resists determinacy.”
—Peter Matthiessen Wheelwright, author of As It Is On Earth and The Door-Man
“Haunting, gorgeous, mysterious, propulsive—a novel as brilliant about currents of violence as it is about the flow of tree pollen through the air and rivers. As I heard echoes of Coetzee and Didion and a music that is all Osborn’s own, I wanted to turn the pages even faster, to learn what would happen next and, at the same time, to slow down and linger on the masterful prose. A stunning accomplishment.”
—Heather Abel, author of The Optimistic Decade
“An astonishing achievement, Osborn’s first novel explores imaginary territories that echo of places, countries, and conflicts we recognize, in the manner of Jim Crace and Italo Calvino, but does so with forensic precision.”
—Susan Daitch, author of The Lost Civilizations of Suolucidir and The Adjudicator
“Osborn’s fever dream of a novel brings us into a shadowy world that feels eerily familiar. Riveting and deeply unsettling, Not Long Ago Persons Found dramatizes just how Byzantine the quest for justice has become in our time.”
—Askold Melnyczuk, author of The House of Widows and The Man Who Would Not Bow
“Osborn’s near-future world is a menacing mix of science, superstition, and governmental treachery as an edgy couple goes deep undercover to investigate a boy’s horrific murder. Not Long Ago Persons Found is exceptionally fast-moving and suspenseful.”
—Sharyn Skeeter, author of Dancing with Langston