Can’t Wait Wednesday: Absence by Andrew Dana Hudson

Can’t-Wait Wednesday is a weekly meme hosted by Wishful Endings to share upcoming book releases that we’re excited about! This meme is based on Waiting on Wednesday, which was created and hosted by Jill at Breaking the Spine.

I’m on a mission to read more weird books in 2026 and Absence caught my eye while I was perusing NetGalley recently. This follows two agents from the Bureau of Depopulation Affairs, an agency formed when people all around the globe started to disappear, as they investigate a woman who claims to have disappeared, and then re-appeared. It gives me Scully and Mulder vibes and honestly, I need more weird books in my life. Absence will be released May 5, 2026.

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 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. His 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 up 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. Is her story true, or is she just the latest false prophet, offering hope to a world desperate for answers? Together with his no-BS partner Shonda Erins, Harvey travels to Dawnville to find out.

A sweeping portrait of a world beset by confusion and dismay, Andrew Dana Hudson’s debut novel is a vividly imagined speculative mystery of cosmic proportions, examining the stories we tell to get by.