About the Book

Buenos Aires, 1976. 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 government’s 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 Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo, an extraordinary group of women who, for over forty-five years, have been searching for children of the “disappeared” — those captured as dissidents during Argentina’s Dirty War.

Early Praise

“Heartbreaking and uplifting, The Disappeared is a testament to the enduring devotion of a mother to her children. A powerful, richly crafted debut by a gifted new voice in historical fiction.” – Sarah Penner, New York Times Bestselling Author of The Lost Apothecary and The London Seance Society

“Written in spare yet wonderfully evocative prose, The Disappeared captures the brutal realities of a shared buried history, one that we can now never afford to forget. Rebecca J. Sanford is a gifted novelist … [a] deeply compelling and important book.” – Andre Dubus III, New York Times Bestselling Author of House of Sand and Fog, The Garden of Last Days and Townie

“The Disappeared will capture your heart and your imagination. Carefully researched and powerfully written … a necessary book to help us find the hundreds of children, now women and men, who were stolen from their families in the Argentina of my own tragedy.” – Alicia Partnoy, Author of The Little School (La Escuelita), Tales of Disappearance & Survival

“The devastation caused by Argentina’s ‘Dirty War’ … lives on in the children of the disappeared, the Mothers and Grandmothers of the disappeared, and society at large. Rebecca Sanford’s compelling book reminds us that there is no ‘over.’” – Diana Taylor, Author of Disappearing Acts, Spectacles of Gender & Nationalism in Argentina’s Dirty War