Absence

by Andrew Dana Hudson

In this gripping, moving, and genre-blending speculative debut, the world is unraveling from an epidemic of human vanishing. Two rookie agents from the Bureau of Depopulation Affairs are dispatched to small-town Kansas to investigate a woman who claims to have returned from Spontaneous Human Absence, offering answers that could change everything.

People are “popping”—disappearing, one by one, into thin air: an ongoing global cataclysm known as Spontaneous Human Absence. In a world where prospects for survival are increasingly grim, hopelessness prevails, political rifts widen, and doomsday predictions flourish.

Harvey Ellis works the night shift for the Bureau of Depopulation Affairs, an ad hoc federal agency meant to contain and catalog the crisis. Harvey’s job: to investigate claims of Absence, and, if validated, issue a standard government stipend to boost morale. Still recovering from losses of his own, Harvey is content in his routine—until his life is shaken by an unexpected assignment from the central office.

A woman long thought Absent has reappeared in her hometown of Dawnville, Kansas, claiming she’s been to the other side and back. But is her wild and irresistible account true, or is she just the latest false prophet, offering hope to a world desperate for it? Together with his no-BS partner, Shonda Erins, Harvey travels to Dawnville to find out.

A resonant portrait of a world beset by confusion and dismay, Andrew Dana Hudson’s debut is a vividly imagined novel of cosmic proportions, examining life in a time of exception and the stories we tell to get by.

Genres: Science Fiction, Fiction, Dystopia, Mystery, Speculative Fiction, Novels, Fantasy

448 pages, Hardcover

Expected publication May 5, 2026

Reviews

[ROLLAND Florence · Rating 4 out of 5]

Imagine a world where people suddenly disappear, massively. They do not fade away - they pop, with a loud sound. And just like that, they are gone.

Our hero is an investigator working for the bureau of depopulation affairs. Imagine a police division, responsible for determining if a person has truly disappeared (an Absentia case), or if something else happened to them. They collect evidence, interview witnesses, fill in paperwork. They have to travel for work to the places where people disappear from, sometimes massively.

This is a slow burn, full of reflections about what makes life meaningful in a world where people can suddenly "pop". Charlatans and scientists alike try to find an explanation, a treatment, a pattern. Some people pretend to return, sometimes years after their disappearance. All the others become afraid of staying alone. Apps are used to let your loved ones know that you are still alive.

The writing style of the author is very poetic. I found it very relaxing, and also very sad. This novel was full of aphorisms about death, relationships, and what gives life meaning. How can anyone fall in love when the other person might disappear at any moment?

Thank you NetGalley and Soho Press for the ARC. Thank you Andrew Dana Hudson for writing it.

[Hannah Durham · Rating 4 out of 5]

What a great read to start the year!

I love a soft-sci fi story rooted in reality so this was an interesting premise to get stuck into. I enjoyed getting to know the characters and their world, whilst exploring the phenomenon of people disappearing into thin air.

A mysterious read that keeps you questioning the truth. Some elements felt a little farcical at points but never quite hit the ‘too much’ point.

Overall, I really enjoyed reading Absence and would recommend.

Thanks to Soho Press and NetGalley for the advance copy!

[Dan · Rating 4 out of 5]

My thanks to NetGalley and Soho Press for an advance copy of this novel that looks at a world that is slowing disappearing, person by person for reasons unknown, and what happens when when of these people, long thought disappeared returns with explanations, explanations that few believe, a story that seems nebulous, with answers that raise more questions than solutions.

Death is something that we all must face, no matter how hard we try not to. All the anti-aging, the drinking of a child's blood, biohacking imprinting one's brains onto the cloud, are just things we as humans have done for thousands of years. Praying, worshipping what ever cool thing is laying around, sacred rituals. All in an effort to hold off the inevitable. Which is why this book left so much of an impression on me. I am not afraid of dying, I am afraid of being left alone. Also death is a lot of paperwork in this society, and I would like to skip that. It is the fear of being alone though, of watching my family die that really makes me uncomfortable. At least I know what is happening. What would it be like if people just disappeared? A pop and one is gone. What happened? Where are they? Can they return? Are they happy? Questions asked in the novel, a book that was far more than I expected. Absence by Andrew Dana Hudson is a book about loss, fear, one comes next, and what happens when someone comes back, with more questions than answers.

Harvey Ellis is a member of the Bureau of Depopulation Affairs, a government agency set up to deal with the sudden rise of people just popping out of existence. One minute there, the next gone. The world has come to pretty much a stand-still. People don't want to have children, for fear they might just disappear. Work places are a nightmare as workers just disappear, as are most forms of entertainment. Apps keep track of people, sharing the information with friends just in case one pops, at least someone might now. A popped person leaves no trace. Just a noise. And are never seen again, something which makes their disappearances even more painful. Ellis along with his partner, and maybe something more Shondra Erins are sent to Dawnville, Kansas to investigate a Return, someone claiming to have popped, but has come back. This happens a bit but most are proves to be liars, or lost people in other ways. Ellis suspects that this return, a young girl who disappeared in high school, but looks older and wiser, might be real. At the same time disappearances are starting to rise, with group pops on the rise, leading to a fear that things might be getting worse. However the more the Returned person shares, the more questions that arise, and the worse the world seems to get.

I did not expect to spend a day of two reading magazines of no importance, English issues of Prog to be precise, because my brain was too busy processing this book. Hudson has built a world that seems more than real. Something that could happen tomorrow. A world of disappearing people, checks given if the person is proved to have been popped, and no real answers for why things are happening, nor how to stop it. The mix of people believing in what is happening, blaming God, or the Government, seems so human. The way Ellis describes the way he lost people, and the feelings he had, the loss, the fear they weren't gone, the blaming others. Hudson does a very good job describing the world, the consequences, and the fears of those left behind. A check to appease people but no answers. A breakdown in morality as mortality seems closer and closer. And the fear. Always the fear.

The book is big with a lot of big ideas and a lot of big questions. A lot of this will stay with the reader, at least it did for me. A lot of fears, and a lot of well, sometimes humans can do interesting things, and keep going. I look forward to more books by Andrew Dana Hudson.

[Robyn · Rating 4 out of 5]

Reading this book made me realize a couple of important things:

1. Great writing can keep you engaged in a story, especially in the messy middle.
2. My favorite genre is speculative fiction. Sci-fi and fantasy are great, but the philosophical touches that come with speculative fiction are uniquely engrossing.

With all of that said, this is a very interesting story. If you enjoy speculative fiction, you will enjoy this book. If you are looking for shades of fantasy, action, or sci-fi this may not be for you as this is not a speculative fiction that crosses into other genres.

I was immediately engaged in the main character, the setting, and the world-building. It had an interesting, if unusual mystery grounding the plot. I would recommend this book to anyone who enjoys the work of Jasper Fforde or Kazuo Ishiguro. The world building and specificity are like Fforde while the philosophical musings remind me of Ishiguro.

What I valued most was the writing. Not only is it written clearly, it is also written for adults. Over the past couple of years, I have struggled to get through many more recent Fantasy, SciFi, and Speculative fiction books because they do not read as though they are written much more conversationally and focused on serving a TikTok or Instagram audience rather than readers.

Sometimes I have a hard time finishing books where the writing feels undisciplined. That was not the case with Absence. While reading you could tell certain words were chosen with precision to convey information in a specific way. As a consequence, the prose was not only absorbing, but it extended the mystery at the heart of the story effectively.

While I truly enjoyed this book, it does not earn 5 stars for two very specific reasons. This is a story without humor. It is quite dark, and while I am sometimes in the mood for that, I do not think I was in the state of mind for such a heavy story. This was compounded by the book's length. While not long (around 450 pages) there are several points where the reader things the end is near, but the story continues. That is not a criticism, the overall story finishes strong, but it does meander in the middle.

While including more moments of levity would reduce the impact of the story, there are several editing choices that might have improved the pacing without sacrificing quality. That being said, I would highly recommend this book. It is excellent.

Thank you to NetGalley and Soho (quickly becoming a standout publisher of Speculative Fiction), for the ARC.

[Bookworm · Rating 4 out of 5]

Rating: B+

Received from netgalley in exchange for a review.

Absence is a strange book. It could make a pretty compelling tv series or movie. Something you'd see on the sci-fi channel. The story follows two agents, Harvey, a young straight white guy, and Shonda, his black coworker with whom he has a sexual affair. The two are investigating the disappearance of Gabriela Reyes, a girl who vanished as a teenager due to a phenomena called Popping (where a person spontaneously disappears out of existence) and returns some years later claiming to have returned from another dimension.

As you can expect there's been some huge upheavals in society in general given the suddenness and unpredictable nature of popping. People now have to do everything in pairs in case they disappear and the government gives a payment to those related popped individuals to help them continue on with life. There's multiple parts of the spectrum: those who choose to ignore depop as they can't prevent it, those who see it as a revelatory sign and those who stop their lives to live in peace awaiting the pop.

One thing I found a bit strange about the world was that, for some reason, popping motivates the us government to build a functional rail system. Why? Now no one is going to really be using it so wheres the money in it? People still travel internationally, everyone is still living in a capitalist hell! Not even the end of the world can stop the machine from turning.

I found the book quite compelling when it came to the character discussions between Shonda and Harvey. Harvey is adrift in his life just working a job he doesn't care about given it's one of the easiest to get, dispassionate about life since his girlfriend popped. Shonda has a husband and child and so she feels more attached to living with purpose. O feel like Harvey could be any of us born too late to really flourish as easily as anyone else could've and the absence system is one that likely would be attractive to people who are just waiting to die or are one pay cheque away from homelessness.

I won't lie and say I'm not somewhat disappointed in the direction the story went but I didn't enjoy it as a mystery drama, less there being not so much science fiction to it.
The whole world has such a feel of there being a haze over the people living in it.

Worth reading if you like a slow paced mystery. Compelling characters.

[Jessica Woodbury · Rating 4 out of 5]

Right up there with any speculative novel of the last ten years. The concept may not sound so new, it may seem like other stories, but Hudson has created a vast world here digging into all kinds of details and unforeseen consequences. The breadth of this worldbuilding tells us a lot about the present moment as well as this strange near-future.

Hudson also has plenty to dive into and examine. It is, of course, a story about grief and our protagonist's journey through it. But it's also about death. Absence is, in many ways, just a magnified kind of death. Now it is more random, more unanticipated, more surprising. We always talk about death as something that could happen any time, but we don't really mean it. In this world, you do mean it. How does that change us? Who does it turn us into? And how does that intersect with so much loss?

Harvey and Shonda are really just bureaucrats, but the investigative nature of their work can make this feel almost like a procedural, it has the nice comforting beats of one. They are trying to solve a mystery, even though that mystery is possibly the biggest mystery that exists. We get the trope of the skeptic and the believer, but it never feels rote. Shonda protects herself, doesn't let everything in. And since we get to see the workings of Harvey's mind we know just how much he balances his own desire to believe with his own worries and doubts.

If this was 50-100 pages shorter it would be pretty perfect. It can get rambly. There are times when this works, when it helps you get grounded in this world. And most of the pacing is great, Hudson lets it stretch and stretch over days, letting things build and then calm and then build again. I'm not sure we need all the flashbacks, and the details of the many religious subtypes pulled me out of it. But despite all that I didn't feel like this was overly long, and I thought the final section was still interesting and had momentum.

A pretty fantastic debut. Excited to see what Hudson does next.

[Rustic Red Reads · Rating 3 out of 5]

I had mix feelings on this book, I think it delivered in the end and enjoyed the first part, but I sometimes have a hard time reading the middle that I almost DNF'd this one.

I'll just say this one since it would be mentioned a lot below, I feel there's too much world-building in this book. I was nearing the end and the author still manage to sprinkle some tidbits of information regarding the world. It feels like books you can read in video games, that's not necessary to understand the whole story, but to give more lore to the world your character is living in.

I'll list some of my problems

(a) Only one POV - I personally think this one hurt this book the most, since we are following one person throughout the whole book. There's a lot of world-building in this book - the Bureau of Depopulation Affairs and how it works, the religious groups that formed, the everyday life of people (through investigation). All of these are through his eyes only. I feel sometimes we are going out of the way or having "bumps" in the investigation to introduce a some a part of the world.

(b) Flashbacks and Bumps - I totally feel that it's a bit unnecessary. While it fleshing the character even more, I think I would like to learn about it in present day. I personally wanted to skip this parts, but I don't want to miss anything. There's another "bump" in the middle that are quite long, I feel its a bit unnecessary and just makes this novel way longer, but it sets up the climax and the conclusion of the novel.

(c) "Sci-Fi" - this was labelled as sci-fi, at the start I thought it is sci-fi since the explanation, or rather the analogy, around the disappearances are science-y. But aside from that it doesn't really feel like sci-fi.

Despite all of this, I think it's still an interesting read but I feel it could be shorter.

[Kristen Connell]

Absence is a gripping and imaginative speculative novel that explores loss, uncertainty, and the fragile narratives people construct in times of crisis.

In this debut, Andrew Dana Hudson presents a chilling premise an epidemic of spontaneous human disappearance and builds it into a deeply human story grounded in emotion and meaning.

One of the book’s most compelling strengths is its concept. The phenomenon of “popping” is both unsettling and metaphorically rich, creating a world that feels eerily plausible despite its speculative nature.

The investigative framework adds a strong narrative drive. Following agents through their inquiry into a supposed return from Absence introduces mystery and tension, while also allowing the story to explore broader philosophical questions.

The characters bring depth to the narrative. Their personal losses and emotional stakes ground the larger crisis, making the story resonate beyond its high concept premise.

Another standout element is the exploration of belief. The novel thoughtfully examines how people respond to uncertainty whether through skepticism, hope, or the need to find meaning in chaos.

The world-building is particularly effective, capturing a society under strain where political divisions widen and desperation shapes behavior.

Thematically, the book explores grief, faith, truth, and the human need for narrative in the face of the unknown. It raises questions without forcing easy answers.

Overall, Absence is a compelling and thought provoking debut that blends speculative fiction with emotional depth, offering a powerful reflection on how people endure and interpret a world coming undone.

[Michelle · Rating 5 out of 5]

Absence is a character-driven, slow-burn speculative mystery with lots of questions and not all the answers.

The vanishing-person-returns twist could’ve gone big and wild, but I appreciated how measured and thoughtful it stayed. Like in The Leftovers, the mystery here is more existential than action-driven, which worked for me. Harvey, the weary, everyday protagonist and his flirty dynamic with co-worker Shonda adds just the right amount of levity and intimacy as the story unfolds.

The writing style is kind of like John Scalzi meets Neal Stephenson with 400+ pages to explore all the nitty-gritty details of a world where anyone anywhere can suddenly disappear. I loved all the small specifics in this depop setting: the Bureau of Depopulation Affairs, the check-in apps, the government programs trying to keep people safe, the cults that spring up in response. It's a sweeping and engaging ride.

Thanks so much to NetGalley and the publisher for a chance to read this beautiful and intriguing novel.

[Jannelies · Rating 4 out of 5]

As is stated in the blurb, this is a novel between two genres, Science Fiction and Dystopian. I’ve enjoyed it a lot.

When slowly but steadily people disappear from this world, with an audible ‘pop’ because of the sound this makes, people are frightened but also curious. A whole new economic system emerges, because when people ‘pop’, their next of kin have the right to receive a check from the government. (Which is actually a bit strange because where would the government get all the money from as there are less and less people to work and pay taxes?) There is now a special Bureau of Depopulation Affairs, and investigators go out to check whether a person really disappeared or their family just want to cash the check.

People are warned not to drive cars alone – lots of accidents happened with cars where the driver suddenly disappeared – and in general, people are advised not to be or go alone anywhere. There are even new railroads build because it is much safer to travel by train, with other people around you. Imagine! So, the world has changed. But, what will happen when everyone on Earth has disappeared? Is this going to happen? And if so, where do they go and what happens to them? There are rumours about people who’ve returned, and so, Harvey and Shonda, both inspectors with the Bureau of Depopulation Affairs are send to a small town where one day a woman turns up claiming she popped ten years ago but is now back.

A sometimes slow-burning but very well written story, very intriguing and cleverly thought out. I hope this debut novel will be followed by more work of this author.

Thanks to SoHo Press and Edelweiss for this review copy.

[Dave Milbrandt · Rating 5 out of 5]

I received a complimentary copy of this book in exchange for an honest evaluation of its merits.

I was really intrigued by this book. The idea of people disappearing without explanation is fascinating enough, but the mundane, humdrum nature that that the government dealt with the problem made it even more believable. The Bureau of Depopulation Affairs is just another bureaucratic agency tasked to deal with a societal ill. Harvey and Shonda are not super agents. They are just regular people with expense accounts and paperwork trying to explain the unexplainable (how a person who has disappeared can reappear). I also liked the Gabby's story, as you are never really sure what the truth is. Again, a clever story well told.

[En · Rating 5 out of 5]

Absence is a soft sci-fi novel that explores the question of "what if everything we believe in were false".

People are randomly popping into thin air. Harvey, our lead, is an investigator in the Depop department, where he actively investigates to separate true absentees from cover-ups. He is sent on an assignment to interview a Returnee. Though most of them were shams, something in his gut tells him this is worth investigating.

Worldbuilding was interesting. With people disappearing at random, we are constantly challenged with deeper what-ifs, and left with the feeling that death is a blessing for those left behind. If you like sci-fi that explores the impact of an imploding world on the human condition, give Absence a go.

[James · Rating 5 out of 5]

Absence is a unique speculative novel with a riveting premise. Large numbers of humans are vanishing in sudden unexplained 'pops'. Andrew Dana Hudson has constructed a fully realized world, a society riven by the unknowable and struggling to make sense of what life is left to face. Agents from the Bureau of Depopulation Affairs investigate what appears to be the first person to return from Absentia. Will she provide answers or only deepen the mystery? Clever, intriguing, and a deep exploration of the human condition. Thanks to NetGalley and Soho Press for the chance to read an advance copy.

[sarai · Rating 5 out of 5]

this was a very fun ride! the author has clearly put a lot of thought into the societal and political ramifications of his world and it shows. (the author also seems to be a public transportation fan which rocks.) i really enjoyed the central mystery and harvey's slow unraveling as he tries to discern an unknowable truth. it's one of those books that will leave you guessing until the very end.

thanks to netgalley and soho press for the e-arc!

[Bridgette · Rating 5 out of 5]

*well-written, easy to read
*strong character development
*kept my interest from cover to cover
*highly recommend