The Disappearing Act

A$30 · Offered by Harry Hartog Rare Books · No longer available

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.

• Binding: Hardcover

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