"I live in a place where people disappear," begins Sheila Nickerson in this visionary quest for the missing in the vast and often stormy stretches of Alaska. As Nickerson, on the brink of retirement, sorts through the detritus of an overstuffed office, she becomes obsessed with the disappearance of a colleague whose Cessna 340A was lost in the area known as Alaska's Bermuda Triangle.

His vanishing leads her back to earlier searches - for the lost Franklin expedition and for the elusive glory of the North Pole.

Setting down her memories as markers, Nickerson travels forward with current occurrences of disappearances - of hikers and climbers, tourists and adventurers, hunters and fishermen, the murdered and unidentified - along with losses of another order: the great shamans, the languages and cultures of the Native peoples, and the natural resources of Alaska, including the oil flowing through the eight-hundred-mile pipeline from Prudhoe Bay to Valdez.

From these musings, a vivid map emerges of uncharted territories and lives that touch through time, coincidence, or the hope of a message buried deep beneath a cairn. In a writing style marked by its grace as well as its gravity, Disappearance: A Map is a wise and knowing evocation that understands that the maps we make of our lives are ultimately charted through the compass points of the heart.