Barbara Quick – What Disappears

What Disappears is a gripping multi-generational tale that begins in 1880s Tsarist Russia and ends in Paris at the start of World War I.

Jeannette Dupres, one of two identical twins born to a Jewish family in dire financial straits, is spirited out of an orphanage as an infant by a couple from France.

The other twin, Sonya Luria, raised to believe her sister died at birth, has her life upended by the 1903 pogrom in Kishinev.

The sisters are reunited in the doorway of Anna Pavlova’s dressing-room, when they both get jobs in Paris with Sergei Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, Sonya as a seamstress and Jeannette as an extra ballerina. In a relationship that ebbs and flows as it evolves, the twins’ deepest, darkest secrets are revealed, affecting not only them but also leaving their mark on the lives and fates of Sonya’s three daughters.

Peopled by the greatest dancers, artists, writers, designers, and trend-setters of the Belle Époque, What Disappears explores the ways in which girls and women define their identity and search for meaning in a world that tries at every turn to hold them back.

Barbara Quick, a three-time novelist and widely anthologized poet, has a worldwide readership. Her 2007 novel from HarperCollins, Vivaldi’s Virgins, was published in a dozen languages, made into an audiobook, and optioned for a mini-series. Her debut novel, Northern Edge, won the Discover: Great New Writers Prize. Her poetry chapbook, The Light on Sifnos, was awarded the 2020 Blue Light Press Poetry Prize. She lives with her husband on a farm and vineyard in Northern California.