Ways To Disappear

Description

A famous Brazilian novelist has disappeared. Beatriz Yagoda was last seen climbing into an almond tree, puffing on a cigar and holding a suitcase. She's since vanished. Upon hearing this news, her American translator Emma, flies immediately to Brazil to join Beatriz's two grown children in solving the mystery of the author's curious disappearance. But in the sticky, sugary heat of Rio, the trio soon discovers the bizarre and troubling affairs Beatriz has left in her wake: outstanding debt from an online gambling addiction that has roused a rapacious loan shark, and the author's washed-up, long-time editor who was promised a new Yagoda manuscript and is desperate to publish. Is the secret to Beatriz's disappearance hidden in her enigmatic novels? Funny, suspenseful, and compulsively readable, Ways to Disappear is a fabulously inventive novel about a group of unconventional characters on a trail that turns their own lives upside down.

Idra Novey is an award-winning poet and translator. Born in western Pennsylvania, she has since lived in Chile, Brazil, and New York. Her collection Exit, Civilian was selected for the 2011 National Poetry Series. She recently translated Clarice Lispector's The Passion of G. H. (Penguin/New Directions). She currently teaches in the Creative Writing Program at Princeton University. This is her first novel.