How to disappear: a memoir for misfits

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.