The Vanishers
Author(s): Heidi Julavits
From the acclaimed novelist and "The Believe"r editor HEIDI JULAVITS, a wildly imaginative and emotionally intense novel about mothers, daughters, and the psychic damage women can inflict on one another.
Is the bond between mother and daughter unbreakable, even by death?
Julia Severn is a student at an elite institute for psychics. Her mentor, the legendary Madame Ackermann, afflicted by jealousy, refuses to pass the torch to her young disciple. Instead, she subjects Julia to the humiliation of reliving her mother's suicide when Julia was an infant. As the two lock horns, and Julia gains power, Madame Ackermann launches a desperate psychic attack that leaves Julia the victim of a crippling ailment.
Julia retreats to a faceless job in Manhattan. But others have noted Julia's emerging gifts, and soon she's recruited to track down an elusive missing person--a controversial artist who might have a connection to her mother. As Julia sifts through ghosts and astral clues, everything she thought she knew of her mother is called into question, and she discovers that her ability to know the minds of others--including her own--goes far deeper than she ever imagined.
As powerful and gripping as all of Julavits's acclaimed novels, "The Vanishers" is a stunning meditation on grief, female rivalry, and the furious power of a daughter's love.
Product Information
"Fantastic"
--"Vanity Fair
"
"An absorbing meditation on female competition with Hitchcockian twists....Gripping"
--"Entertainment Weekly
""Darkly comic....sharp-eyed, sardonic, hilarious....Julavits is at her acrobatically linguistic best here. Nearly every page contains a showstopping description or insight...narrative voice is superb. Funny, self-deprecating, exquisitely attuned....Vivid....Remarkable....Heartbreaking."
--"New York Times Book Review
"
"Open The Vanishers to any page and you'll find some of the snappiest dialogue going. Stylish and fiercely funny, Heidi Julavits's fourth novel explores the imagined dangers and dizzying thrills of being a career psychic....Julavits is a fearlessly inventive writer, a risk-taker who never shies away from prickly, tangled, often meaphorical emotional darkness and constantly strikes out into unexplored territory....the sharply original narrative, which moves at top speed, [is] always entertaining and full of curiosities, deadpan banter, and metaphysical playfulness.....a wild, fun ride that doesn't let up until the last sentence."
--"Elle
"
"Heidi Julavits has a questing, eclectic intellect....wry wit and linguistic exuberance. She creates a sophisticated symmetry in the final surprising moments of Julia's story, and, as if in an encore, adds an adroit comic flip at the end."
--"Boston Globe
"
"The protagonist could join the ranks of literature's most unreliable narrators alongside Humbert Humbert..."
--"Wall Street Journal
"
"Sharp-eyed, sardonic"
"--New York Times, Editor's Choice
"
"Part coming-of-age story, part murder mystery, part absurdist romp, part neurological novel. I loved it.....Julavtis' characters are as earnestly bizarre as Haruki Murakami's, and she's as funny as Lorrie Moore.....wonderful and interesting complications....Julavits is so smart and funny, and her writing is so good."
--"San Francisco Chronicle
"
"Ms. Julav
General Fields
- :
- : Doubleday
- : 0.603
- : 01 February 2012
- : 235mm X 163mm X 27mm
- : United Kingdom
- : books
Special Fields
- : 284
- : 813.54
- : 312
- : Hardback
- : Heidi Julavits