Ways to Disappear

When a famous Brazilian author disappears, her translator becomes obsessed with following her trail in this prize-winning, “elegant page-turner” (New York Times Book Review).

Beatriz Yagoda was once one of Brazil's most celebrated authors. At the age of sixty, she is mostly forgotten-until one summer afternoon when she enters a park in Rio de Janeiro, climbs into an almond tree, and disappears.

When her devoted translator Emma hears the news in snowy Pittsburgh, she decamps for Rio to help Yagoda's son and daughter solve the mystery. But as they meet the colorful characters left in the author's wake—including a loan shark with a debt to collect and the washed-up editor who launched Yagoda's career—they discover how much of her they never knew.

Exquisitely imagined and as profound as it is suspenseful, Ways to Disappear is at once a thrilling story of intrigue and a radiant novel of self-reckoning.

Winner of the Sami Rohr Prize in Fiction