Ways to Disappear

Winner of the Sami Rohr Prize in Fiction

Finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for First Fiction

NPR Best Book of 2016
Buzzfeed Best Debut of 2016
BUST Magazine Best Book of 2016

Winner of the 2016 Brooklyn Eagles Literary Prize for Fiction

New York Times Editors’ Choice

2016 Barnes & Noble Discover selection

For fans of Robin Sloan’s Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore and Maria Semple’s Where’d You Go, Bernadette, an inventive, brilliant debut novel about the disappearance of a famous Brazilian novelist and the young translator who turns her life upside down to follow her author’s trail.

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 wintry Pittsburgh, she flies to the sticky heat of Rio. There she joins the author’s son and daughter to solve the mystery of Yagoda’s disappearance and satisfy the demands of the colorful characters left in her wake, including a loan shark with a debt to collect and the washed-up editor who launched Yagoda’s career. What they discover is 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.

"[A] seductive mystery....Novey, a poet and translator, brings to her first novel a zesty comic touch and refreshing insights into the delicate processes of writing and translation." Jane Ciabattari, BBC

"Idra Novey, an acclaimed poet and translator of Spanish and Portugese literature, has written a debut novel that's a fast-paced, beguilingly playful, noirish literary mystery with a translator at its center. Ways to Disappear explores the meaning behind a writer's words--the way they can both hide and reveal deep truths....Novey's novel delivers on its promises in so many ways."  Heller McAlpin, NPR

“An elegant page-turner….Charges forward with the momentum of a bullet.” New York Times Book Review

Idra Novey is an award-winning poet and translator. Born in western Pennsylvania, she has since lived in Chile, Brazil, and New York. The author of Exit, Civilian, selected for the 2011 National Poetry Series, Novey’s poetry and fiction have been featured on NPR’s All Things Considered, and in Slate, StoryQuarterly, The Paris Review, and Guernica. She currently teaches in the Creative Writing Program at Princeton University.