The exquisite and heart-breaking exploration of love and loss, ` a gentle masterpiece' highly-praised by reviewers ranging from Philippa Perry, Richard Coles, Andrew O'Hagan, Joan Bakewell.

When Ruth's beloved, reckless daughter is too caught up in drugs to look after her baby, Ruth decides to make off with the child.
This time she'll get the love right.
I had that brilliant rare experience of the book being so good that I was in it and forgot I was reading. Philippa Perry
This beautiful tale of love, courage and compassion...captures the pain of estrangement in penetrating, haunting language... Loved and Missed is a complex, deeply moving novel ? Independent
a minor masterpiece...riveting, exquisitely written...Piercingly insightful and skilfully plotted, it has so much to say about mothers and daughters MAIL ON SUNDAY
Boyt is both funny...and poignant...but never less than impeccably truthful, with a broad, oft breathtaking wisdom -- Irish Independent
Boyt's novel is compelling - and invites our compassion for those who may not always earn it, but still deserve it. --The Sunday Telegraph
hopeful... heroic, humorous The Observer
An acute, enormously moving study of familial love, iNewspaper