WINNER OF THE 2012 PEN/ACKERLEY PRIZE
A haunting memoir on the nature of belonging and the lure of escape.
In this series of five brilliantly written and irrepressibly quirky travelogues, Duncan Fallowell sets out to odd corners of the world in pursuit of some extraordinary and improbable characters who were, in most cases, momentarily famous – or infamous – and then simply disappeared.
From an out-of-season Gozo and a becalmed Indian hill-town; to a remote Scottish island, where a German artist vanished immediately after he had bought a large island in the Hebrides, and a Welsh fishing village, where Fallowell tracks down the model for Sebastian Flyte, the aristocratic anti-hero of Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited, How to Disappear winds through the eerie abyss that can open up between someone – or something – being both real and phantom.
Written with a fierce intelligence and charmingly offbeat humour, How to Disappear is one of the most unusual ‘autobiographies’ – not to mention collection of travellers’ tales – ever written.
About the Author :
DUNCAN FALLOWELL is a novelist, travel writer and critic, whose best-known books include April Ashley's Odyssey, the biography of a transsexual, One Hot Summer in St Petersburg and Twentieth-Century Characters. He lives in London.
Review :
'Brilliant and haunting'
'His prose is as good/better than anyone now writing non-fiction. Fascinating stories and people. A must-read.'
‘Absorbing memoir. He is by turns erudite, catty, curious and nostalgic and the dominant questing figure in every adventure. There are images here that, unlike his central subjects, refuse to fade from view.’
'Brilliant and haunting'
‘Quirky, quixotic and glorious fun’
'Vivid and highly pleasurable.'
'Magical, original and an unforgettable read'
'Profundity, wit and joyful naughtiness'
'A masterpiece of refined subversion'
'Fallowell is a mischievous mixture of pagan sybarite and erudite aesthete'
'A wonderful feat of writing and insight into our merciless, often beautiful world'
‘A book of the momentarily famous yet now often forgotten, this is an absorbing look into what happens when they leave the spotlight. It’s poignant and often touching. This book will stay with you long after you have finished it.’
‘Absorbing memoir. He is by turns erudite, catty, curious and nostalgic and the dominant questing figure in every adventure. There are images here that, unlike his central subjects, refuse to fade from view.’
‘The characters in this group biography may have disappeared from public consciousness, deliberately or otherwise, but they surface in Fallowell’s insistence that their forgotten lives deserve a second act.’
'His prose can be wonderful. He writes like a spikier Sebald, alternating between acerbic witticisms and passages of voluptuous description.'
'His prose is as good/better than anyone now writing non-fiction. Fascinating stories and people. A must-read.'
‘A wonderfully bookish memoirist with an exquisite sense of place.’
