Captivating and capacious... The novel comes across as an urgent call to resist complacency and recover one's vitality in the face of injustice. It's a stunner.
— Publishers Weekly (starred review)
From the renowned Russian author of In Memory of Memory, a stunning new dream-like work about exile, home, and art.
The writer M has lived in the city of B ever since her homeland declared war on a neighboring state. While in exile, she is unable to write and suffers from loneliness, shame, and despair. But then M is invited to give a reading at a literary festival in a nearby country, and after a series of missed connections and mishaps, including losing her phone, she finds herself all alone in the wrong coastal town. She feels a flicker of liberation—the possibility of starting over—but memories of childhood, books, films and tarot cards pull her back, the last fragments of a vanishing world. Then she meets a troupe of circus performers who invite her to join them …
In this brief interlude, severed from reality, it seems as if M may finally escape from herself, from her past, from her nationality. Written in rich and hypnotic prose, The Disappearing Act oscillates between reality and dream, between an oppressive present and a lost past, between life and literature.
Captivating and capacious... The novel comes across as an urgent call to resist complacency and recover one's vitality in the face of injustice. It's a stunner.
— Publishers Weekly (starred review)
Stepanova's prose work is discursive, expansively imaginative in its musings and digressions. The translation by Dugdale is lucid, vivid and fluid.
— Barbara Conaty, The Library Journal
The DisappearingAct is a witty, unsettling and profound reflection on belonging and estrangement
— Abdulrazak Gurnah
Poignant, ironizing its own ironies, as M finds two wrongs—any number of wrongs—never make a right.
— Michael Autrey, Booklist
This is an intimate and profound study of liminality and identity from one of the most important writers of our time.
— Pierce Alquist, Book Riot
Dugdale’s translation is a loving one, beautifully rendering Stepanova’s melodic and rhythmic prose into precise English… With The Disappearing Act, Stepanova’s talents have grown to include a magical quality, and it leaves me longing for more of her tricks.
— Olga Zilberbourg, On the Seawall
Expect entrancing prose suffused with wry observations, a little humour and memories of lost worlds—the world lost with the fall of the Soviet Union; the world lost to Vladimir Putin; the world lost to the Ukraine war—more redolent of great poetry than contemporary fiction.
