The author of Lime Juice Money returns with a literary thriller involving two estranged women, one with postnatal depression who goes missing in a New Zealand surf town, the other whose search to find her unravels a community’s secrets, including a fortune from whaling and an obsessive stalker.

One missing woman. One wayward sister. Too many secrets.
Welcome to Eastmere, where everyone’s got something to hide.

When Cleo arrives in Eastmere, an isolated surfer town on New Zealand’s North Island, she’s looking for one thing—her missing sister, Eden. But the town is reeling after a giant whale washed up in the bay, and they don’t like strangers, especially not nosy outsiders like Cleo who ask too many questions. As she digs deeper into finding her sister, Cleo must navigate the town’s dark secrets she unearths—stolen ambergris, the insularity and territoriality of the community, a hidden culture of crystal meth abuse. But she can’t find the one answer she wants: what happened to Eden and does she want to be found?

Told from the sisters’ dual points of view and interspersed with vignettes from a mystery Perfumier’s journal, The Day of the Stranding is a tale of psychological suspense that interweaves the small-town tension of Mare of Easttown and Jane Harper’s The Dry, the literary puzzles of Liz Moore’s God of the Woods, and the claustrophobic darkness of Gillian Flynn’s Sharp Objects. Jo Morey deftly explores themes of grief, motherhood, and renewal that lie beneath a cloak of mystery.