Vanishers, Heidi Julavits

Julia Severn is ill, she works in a run-down carpet store in New York and takes so many pills that if you shook her she’d rattle. Her doctors can’t find anything wrong with her. The last time she was healthy was over a year ago when she was stenographer to the famed physic Madame Ackermann, Julia wasn’t such a slouch in the physic department herself and while the illness and the medications may have blunted her gift her sense of humour remains more-or-less intact. To get better Julia must become one of the ‘vanished’-people who have chosen to absent themselves from their own lives. But whilst recovering she comes across a wayward heiress, a conniving widow and a noted academic all involved in the hunt for a controversial French filmmaker who has some surprising links to Julia’s own mother Elizabeth. ‘Vanishers’ is a paranormal dramedy with surprising depth.