"The Disappearing Act concerns a novelist in her fifties who lives in an unnamed European country and is on her way to a literary festival in an unnamed location. Her name is given only as “M”. We vaguely understand, from the occasional observation of a shrub in “fierce” bloom, that it is summer. Maria Stepanova doesn’t tell us that M is Russian but we learn this early on in a reflective turn: when M attends literary events, readers ask her about the books she has written, and then, “with far more curiosity, about the country she’d come from. This country was currently waging war against a neighbouring country, killing the inhabitants with missiles, with fire from the skies …”.:
