The Disappeared

Summary

Inspired by the real mothers and grandmothers who spoke out against Argentina’s military dictatorship, The Disappeared is an award-winning debut about identity, family secrets, and those who endured decades of hardship to expose the truth.

In 1976 Buenos Aires, Lorena Ledesma is a housewife with dangerous secrets living under Argentina’s rising military dictatorship. When she and her husband are torn from their home by the paramilitary in the middle of the night, their two-year-old son is left behind with Lorena’s mother, Esme. There’s never any record of the arrest. Desperate to locate Lorena, Esme joins an underground group of mothers who are investigating the disappearances of their own missing children. But when they make a devastating discovery—that several of their kidnapped daughters have given birth in prison—a new kind of pursuit begins: the search for their stolen grandchildren.

Nearly three decades later, thousands of miles away, American adoptee Rachel Sprague learns she has a biological brother from another country—somewhere she has never visited. But the truth goes far deeper than the results of a DNA test, and revealing her origins will expose painful family secrets that could put Rachel’s loved ones in jeopardy.

A heart-wrenching drama that spans thirty years, The Disappeared is inspired by the true stories of the mothers and grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo, an extraordinary group of women who, for more than forty-five years, have been searching for children of the “disappeared”—those captured as dissidents during Argentina’s Dirty War.