The Disappearing Act
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- Pre-Order
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- Expected 26 Feb 2026
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- $11.99
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- Pre-Order
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
The writer known as M. is living in exile while her home country wages war on a neighbouring state. Wracked by shame and severed from her language, M. finds herself unable to write, unmoored in a present where the future feels unknowable. When she travels to a nearby country for an event, a twist of fate leaves her stranded in an unfamiliar city, phoneless and untraceable. In this rupture, 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. For a moment, reinvention seems within reach. Oscillating between reality and dream, written in rich, hypnotic prose, The Disappearing Act is a haunting meditation on identity, language and the fragile desire to disappear by Maria Stepanova, one of Russia's greatest living writers.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this captivating and capacious novel from Stepanova (In Memory of Memory), a 50-year-old novelist experiences a bizarre and liberating metamorphosis while in exile from her unnamed home country, which has just started a devastating war with its neighbor. On a train to a literary festival in another country, M, a native Russian speaker who hasn't written anything in a while, can't escape the feeling that "her life now boiled down to reading the news and military dispatches," and that there is a beast inside of her barely kept at bay by the "façade of politeness." When her train is abruptly halted due to a rail strike, M finds herself stranded in a small coastal town. With her phone dead, she reads the health warnings on her box of cigarettes and thinks about tarot cards. In a liminal state, she wanders onto a circus ground where the company of sideshow performers have recently lost their magician. M volunteers to save their act by participating in a trick in which she appears to be sawed in half. Seemingly reborn and alive to herself for the first time in years after the performance, M now says her name is A, and she leaves behind her passive former self. Far from a literary gimmick, 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.
