# The Disappearing Act

Canonical: https://www.bookquiver.com/maria-stepanova/the-disappearing-act/9781804272329

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![The Disappearing Act](https://quivercdn.com/covers/fitzcarraldo-editions/maria-stepanova/the-disappearing-act_978-18-0427-232-9-679af252.webp?v=2026-11-09%2016%3A38%3A57)

- Book: [The Disappearing Act](https://www.bookquiver.com/maria-stepanova/the-disappearing-act) ([The Disappearing Act.md](https://www.bookquiver.com/maria-stepanova/the-disappearing-act.md))
- Authors: [Maria Stepanova](https://www.bookquiver.com/maria-stepanova)
- Publisher: Fitzcarraldo Editions
- ISBN: 978-18-0427-232-9
- Pages: 136
- Published: 2026-02-26
- Language: en_US
- Binding: Softcover

## Description

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.