The Disappearing Act - Maria Stepanova, Sasha Dugdale (Translator)

Category: General Fiction
Language: English
Keywords: Novella Russia Russian Literature

Written by Maria Stepanova, Sasha Dugdale (Translator)
Read by Clare Wille
Format: M4B
Bitrate: 128 Kbps
Unabridged

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.

Length: 4 hrs and 15 mins
Release date: 02-26-26