Published in 2016
272 pages
Idra Novey is the author of the novel Those Who Knew, a Best Book of 2018 with NPR, Esquire, BBC, Real Simple, O magazine, Kirkus Reviews and a New York Times Editors’ Choice. Her first novel Ways to Disappear received the 2017 Sami Rohr Prize, the 2016 Brooklyn Library Literary Prize, and was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for First Fiction. Her fiction and poetry have been translated into twelve languages. She’s written for The New York Times, the LA Times, and NPR’s All Things Considered. She’s also translated four books from Spanish and Portuguese, most recently Clarice Lispector’s novel The Passion According to G.H.
What is this book about?
Deep in gambling debt, the celebrated Brazilian writer Beatriz Yagoda is last seen holding a suitcase and a cigar and climbing into an almond tree. She abruptly vanishes.
In snowy Pittsburgh, her American translator Emma hears the news and, against the wishes of her boyfriend and Beatriz’s two grown children, flies immediately to Brazil. There, in the sticky, sugary heat of Rio, Emma and her author’s children conspire to solve the mystery of Yagoda’s curious disappearance and staunch the colorful demands of her various outstanding affairs: the rapacious loan shark with a zeal for severing body parts, and the washed-up and disillusioned editor who launched Yagoda’s career years earlier.
