Disappearance

On the first page of Colum McCann’s compelling novel Twist we meet the two leads: John A. Conway, who has disappeared, and Anthony Fennell, who’s trying to tell his story. They first met when Fennell, an Irish journalist, struggling novelist and occasional playwright, was commissioned by an online magazine to write about the fragile fibre-optic cables that carry information around the world on the ocean floor. Conway, also Irish, an engineer and intrepid freediver, was in joint command of the Georges Lecointe, a ship that spends months at sea repairing the cables when they break. In January 2019 this happened in three places. Fennell hitched a lift with Conway when

Stephen May used to write contemporary novels about men who ‘live outside big cities, lack self-confidence and rarely feature in contemporary fiction’, as he once put it, adding: ‘Even Nick Hornby’s characters are more sorted than mine.’ But a chance discovery of a Wikipedia page about the three weeks that a young Stalin spent in Edwardian London sent May’s imagination hurtling back through the decades. The result was Sell Us the Rope (2022), his sixth novel, which imagined what Koba, the Georgian then better known as Joseph Dzhugashvili, got up to in 1907 while attending the Fifth Congress of the Russian Social Democratic Labour party. May mixed the real with

Jennifer Croft is a translator of uncommon energy. In 2018 she won the International Booker Prize for her rendering of Flights by Olga Tokarczuk. In 2021, she took on Tokarczuk’s The Books of Jacob, a great big historical epic. Now she’s written a satirical page-turner set over what one character calls ‘seven toxic, harrowing, oddly arousing, extremely fruitful weeks’. Like members of some ancient mystery cult, eight translators fetch up in a house near a primeval forest in Poland on the Belarus border. The year is 2017. ‘Bedraggled and ecstatic’, they’ve come to translate Szara eminencja (Grey Eminence), a novel about art and mass extinction, by the Stockholm-worthy woman of

In September 1890 a Frenchman called Louis Le Prince left his brother in Dijon and boarded a train to Paris, with the intention of connecting to London and then to Leeds, before finally joining his wife Lizzie and family in New York. But the weeks turned into months, and to his wife’s astonishment and dismay he never arrived or saw his family again. He had disappeared. A mere eight months later Thomas Edison would unveil the ‘Kinetograph’ to the world, claiming his apparatus to be the birth of the moving image, featuring ‘pure motion recorded and reproduced’ for the first time. Recognising the device as a version of one invented