Malcolm Orange Disappears

By Jan Carson

Eleven-year-old Malcolm Orange has grown up in the backseat of an ancient Volvo station wagon, crisscrossing America with a diminishing collection of grandparents, one good-for-nothing father, an increasingly absent mother, and an unfortunately ordinary brother. Their journey ends abruptly in a pay-by-the-week motel in Portland, Oregon when his father finally abandons the family. Impoverished and alone, the remaining Oranges find themselves living in Chalet 13 of the Baptist Retirement Village. While his mother develops her own strange means of coping with the loss, Malcolm Orange begins to disappear, becoming more perforated each morning - until there is little of the original Malcolm left. Desperate for a cure, he enlists the help of Soren James Blue, her talking cat, Mr Fluff, and the very elderly members of the People's Committee for Remembering Songs. Malcolm and his friends set off on a hilarious and heartbreaking adventure to discover a cure for disappearing. On their way they encounter the flying children of Oklahoma, the dastardly plans of Dr Blue and all the sinister secrets hiding behind the doors of his Treatment Room. As Malcolm Orange wages youthful war on his own small losses, each of his elderly friends must learn how to accept their own peculiar disappearing act. An unforgettable story bursting with heart, imagination, tenderness and humor - a supremely confident debut.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Liberties Press
• Release date: Jun 2, 2014
• ISBN: 9781909718548

Jan Carson

Jan Carson is a writer and community arts facilitator based in Belfast, Northern Ireland. She has a novel, Malcolm Orange Disappears (Liberties Press, 2014), and short story collection, Children’s Children (Liberties Press, 2016), as well as a micro-fiction collection, Postcard Stories (Emma Press, 2017). Her novel The Fire Starters was published by Doubleday in 2019 and won the EU Prize for Literature for Ireland the same year. In 2018 she was the inaugural Translink/Irish Rail Roaming Writer in Residence on the Trains of Ireland.

Reviews for Malcolm Orange Disappears

[vivienner_3 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Northern Ireland author, Jan Carson, has the most imaginative writing style I've ever come across. That it's a debut novel makes it all the more awe-inspiring. Eleven year-old Malcolm, his parents, and baby brother travel around America living in their beat-up Volvo. Malcolm is worried about the holes that are beginning to form on his body although no one else notices. When the father abandons the family, Malcolm's mother finds a job and home at a Baptist retirement village in Oregon filled, of course, with fantastically colourful characters. Carson maintains the surprise factor throughout this ingenius story without once letting up. This is a wonderful, unforgettable story.