The Diver's Clothes Lie Empty (Ecco Press)
From the acclaimed author of Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name and The Lovers comes a taut, spellbinding literary thriller that probes the essence and malleability of identity.
In Vendela Vida's taut and mesmerizing novel of ideas, a woman travels to Casablanca, Morocco, on mysterious business. While checking into her hotel, the woman is robbed of her wallet and passport--all of her money and identification. Though the police investigate, the woman senses an undercurrent of complicity between the hotel staff and the authorities--she knows she'll never recover her possessions. Stripped of her identity, she feels burdened by the crime yet strangely liberated by her sudden freedom to be anyone she chooses.
A chance encounter with a movie producer leads to a job posing as a stand-in for a well-known film star. The star reels her in deeper, though, and soon she's inhabiting the actress's skin off set, too--going deeper into the Casablancan night and further from herself. And so continues a strange and breathtaking journey full of unexpected turns, an adventure in which the woman finds herself moving further and further away from the person she once was.
Told with vibrant, lush detail and a wicked sense of humor, The Diver's Clothes Lie Empty is part literary mystery, part psychological thriller--an unforgettable novel that explores free will, power, and a woman's right to choose not her past, perhaps not her present, but certainly her future. This is Vendela Vida's most assured and ambitious novel yet.
Praise for The Diver's Clothes Lie Empty
"Vida is a subtle writer whose voice is spare and authoritative, at times sounding like a less gothic Paul Bowles, and her third novel is further evidence that she can fashion characters as unpredictable as they are endearing ."--New York Times Book Review
"Vida gives the icy landscape and eerie, forbidding beauty and her writing has . . . great emotional acuity."--The New Yorker
"A chilling tale about the gradual loss of identity-a novel of doubles, invisibility and lies, poised somewhere between a fever-dream and a suspenseful thriller . . . Vendela Vida perfectly captures what it feels like to be unreal, especially to oneself, and grasping at roles in order to survive."--Sheila Heti, author of How Should a Person Be?
"You will tear through Vendela Vida's The Diver's Clothes Lie Empty, this wry, edgy, philosophical thriller, this love child of Albert Camus and Patricia Highsmith, this sly satire of Hollywood, this entertaining journey through the vast desert of identity and regret."--Jess Walter, author of Beautiful Ruins
"Vendela Vida has written a truly original novel, a work of art that shines with Bunuelian play and cruelty. The situation is discomfiting and addictive. You will be driven to read this novel compulsively, and then you will have the same strange sly smile that I do, now."--Rachel Kushner, author of The Flamethrowers
"Part glamorous travelogue, part slow-burn mystery, this full-bodied tale of a runaway is at once formally inventive and heartbreakingly familiar. (It's also insanely funny.)"--Lena Dunham
Vendela Vida is the author of four previous books, including Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name and The Lovers, and a founding editor of The Believer magazine, Vida is the winner of the Kate Chopin Award, given to a writer whose female protagonist choses an unconventional path, and two of her novels have been New York Times Notable Books of the Year.
Photo by Annabel Mehran
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