Haunting, gorgeous, mysterious, propulsive—a novel as brilliant about currents of violence as it is about the flow of tree pollen through the air and rivers. As I heard echoes of Coetzee and Didion and a music that is all Osborn’s own, I wanted to turn the pages even faster, to learn what would happen next and, at the same time, to slow down and linger on the masterful prose. A stunning accomplishment.
— Heather Abel, author of The Optimistic Decade
Not Long Ago Persons Found
The body of a young boy is found floating in a city river with pollen in his lungs from a warm river valley far from the country where he died. Who is he? Why was he carrying only a library card and decorative clay bottle? How is it that he came so far, only to meet with a violent fate?
A biological anthropologist and her husband, the forensic team’s translator, are tasked by their agency to gather evidence from the far away country and deliver an explanation—preferably one that suits the political regimes of both countries. But as the scientists’ clandestine, parallel study of recent mass graves brings them closer to finding a link between the boy and “the disappeared,” the full forces of bureaucracy, fatalism, and forgetting are marshalled against them.
Ebook
- ISBN
- 9781954276413
Paperback
- ISBN
- 9781954276406
- Publication date
- June 10th, 2025
J. Richard Osborn lives in Oakland, California. Not Long Ago Persons Found is his first novel.
visit author page »Praise for Not Long Ago Persons Found
An astonishing achievement, Osborn’s first novel explores imaginary territories that echo of places, countries, and conflicts we recognize, in the manner of Jim Crace and Italo Calvino, but does so with forensic precision.
— Susan Daitch, author of The Lost Civilizations of Suolucidir and The Adjudicator
J. Richard Osborn’s fever dream of a novel brings us into a shadowy world that feels eerily familiar. Riveting and deeply unsettling, Not Long Ago Persons Found dramatizes just how Byzantine the quest for justice has become in our time.
— Askold Melnyczuk, author of The House of Widows and The Man Who Would Not Bow
J. Richard Osborn’s near-future world is a menacing mix of science, superstition, and governmental treachery as an edgy couple goes deep undercover to investigate a boy’s horrific murder. Not Long Ago Persons Found is exceptionally fast-moving and suspenseful.
— Sharyn Skeeter, author of Dancing with Langston
Part ghost story, part scientific disquisition, and part political intrigue, Not Long Ago Persons Found is a gripping, Borgesian allegory of our futile attempts to see between things—between peoples, places, and ‘through gaps in the trees’—in order to find truth and meaning in a world that resists determinacy.
— Peter Matthiessen Wheelwright, author of As It Is On Earth and The Door-Man