The Vanishers

(Paperback)

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From acclaimed novelist and editor of The Believer Heidi Julavits, comes a wildly imaginative novel about grief, female rivalry, and the furious power of a daughter's love. From acclaimed novelist and editor of The Believer Heidi Julavits, comes a wildly imaginative novel about grief, female rivalry, and the furious power of a daughter's love. Julia Severn is a talented student at an elite institute for psychics. When Julia's mentor, the legendary Madame Ackerman, grows jealous of her protegee's talents, she subjects Julia to the painful humiliation of reliving her mother's suicide . . . and then launches a desperate psychic attack. But Julia's gifts, though a threat to her teacher, prove an asset to others. Soon she's recruited to track down a missing person who might have a connection to her mother. As Julia sifts through ghosts and astral clues, everything she thought she knew about 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.

Reviews

Darkly comic. . . . Sharp-eyed, sardonic, hilarious. . . . Julavits is at her acrobatically linguistic best. . . . Remarkable.
The New York Times Book Review

It is always an adventure and a delight to read Heidi Julavits. Her intellectual brio and descriptive inventiveness are on full display in The Vanishers, but shes gone further this time by inventing a new genre: the astral detective thriller.
Jennifer Egan, Pulitzer Prizewinning author of A Visit from the Goon Squad

An absorbing meditation on female competition with Hitchcockian twists. . . . Gripping.
Entertainment Weekly

Part coming-of-age story, part murder mystery, part absurdist romp, part neurological novel. . . . . Julavits characters are as earnestly bizarre as Haruki Murakamis, and shes as funny as Lorrie Moore.
San Francisco Chronicle

Sharply original. . . . Stylish and fiercely funny. . . . A wild, fun ride that doesnt let up until the last sentence. . . . Julavits is a fearlessly inventive writer.
Elle

Julavits is a keen observer of the high drama. . . . An evocative writer, she conjures up the supernatural in a way that feels plausible. . . . Haunting.
The Economist

The protagonist . . . could join the ranks of literatures most unreliable narrators, alongside Humbert Humbert and Huck Finn.
Wall Street Journal

Themes of loss, reinvention and the ways women build each other up and tear each other down . . . run through The Vanishers. But Julavits balances the emotional vertigo with sharp wit. . . . Like a dream, its never anything but intriguing.
The Seattle Times

Julavits has a questing, eclectic intellect. . . . She creates a sophisticated symmetry in the final surprising moments of Julias story, and, as if in an encore, adds an adroit comic flip at the end.
The Boston Globe

A fascinating inquiry into matriarchal structures: their power struggles, the projections, distortions, and anxieties that result, and, above all, the creativeand destructiveenergies that they unleash. A real achievement.
Tom McCarthy, author of Remainder and C

Thrilling, subversive insights. . . . Powerful in many ways. . . . On the subject of loss in particular, Julavits is an expert, writing with eloquence and poetry.
The Philadelphia Inquirer

Bristling with wicked humor and sharp-edged irony, The Vanishers explores the ways in which the dead can haunt the living and the often painful persistence of memory.
Huffington Post

A blistering read. Female aggression may lurk everywhere, but Julavits decides to unleash her antagonists in a quirky realm, the fictional Institute of Integrated Parapsychology, a New Hampshire school for students of the occult. . . . If youre lucky, you have one brazen friend who can mesmerize the room with a wild story. If youre not, The Vanishers will provide a similar jolt of transgressive, feminine thrill.
The Plain Dealer

Julavits is no ordinary writer, and themeta-heavy brilliance of her fourth novel is something akin to a Sylvia Plath poem transferred telepathically to a psychic who happens to be solving a missing-persons case while being film-followed by artist Sophie Calle.
Interview

Fantastic, deep and complicated. . . . Explores the way loss, disappointment, anger, deception and trauma can bleed down from generation to generation. . . . A complicated, often troubling meditation on the complexities of relationships.
The Boston Phoenix

Clever. . . . Funny, affecting. . . . Julavits has imagined an ambitious world that reveals the depths of the matriarchal power structure. . . . At the same time, [she] does some clever twisting to the classic revenge plot. . . . Satisfying in all its attempts as a robust mystery, satire of academia, and finicky family drama.
Grantland

One of the best novels Ive ever read, delivering all the immediate pleasures of mystery, horror, and satire while exploring grief in language that is as shocking for its originality as its precision. Julavits takes readers on a wild ride that hops continents and decades, but the real setting of The Vanishers is the gray territory between sickness and health, sanity and delusion, love and hatred, life and death.
Karen Russell, author of Swamplandia! and St. Lucys Home for Girls Raised by Wolves

Author Bio

A founding editor of The Believer magazine and the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, Heidi Julavits is also the author of three critically acclaimed novels- The Uses of Enchantment, The Effect of Living Backwards, and The Mineral Palace.