Ways to Disappear

Author(s): Idra Novey

Location(s): Brazil

Genre(s): Mystery

Era(s): Modern

In a crumbling park in the crumbling back end of Copacabana, a woman stopped under an almond tree with a suitcase and a cigar.

That was the last time anyone saw the famous Brazilian novelist Beatriz Yagoda.

Upon hearing the news of her disappearance, her American translator Emma flies immediately to Brazil. There, in the sticky, sugary heat of Rio, Emma and Beatriz’s two grown children conspire to solve the author’s curious disappearance. But as the trio begins to uncover the bizarre and troubling affairs Beatriz has left in her wake — an outstanding gambling debt, a rapacious loan shark, and the author’s long-time editor who is desperate for the next Yagoda manuscript — they realise their search for her is far more cryptic than they could have imagined. Are the secrets to Beatriz s disappearance hidden in her enigmatic novels? Or are her words obscuring more than they reveal?

Brilliant, suspenseful, and compulsively readable, Ways to Disappear is a fabulously inventive novel about the ways we do appear to one another. Both playful and profound, it is as much a mystery as it is a manifesto on the joys of translation. Idra Novey is a bold, unprecedented new voice in fiction.

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