A purple bicycle, a broken statuette, doughnuts, and a spur-of-the-moment drive with a virtual stranger take Selby Green away from her grey existence toward real life. She discovers belonging and warmth through the cruel route of heartbreak; the price of impulsiveness. Bohemian glass, the forests of Moravia, escape from behind the Iron Curtain, and a ten-pound assisted passage to Australia bring Edmund Eben from nowhere to here. He designs vases, sells hats, paints pictures, yearns to belong, learns to love. Edmund and Selby are somehow connected. Time, history, pain and the inexorable pull of kinship bring them together through tenuous ties and unbreakable bonds. How to Disappear is a novel in two parts that links two analogous lives. It is one story, two courses. Two lives, one fate. It is a demonstration of how confusion and loss only need a stroke of convergence to develop into enduring affection.