How To Disappear: A Memoir for Misfits

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Following previous winners Alan Bennett, Diana Athill, Anthony Burgess, Germaine Greer, and Michael Frayn, gay writer Duncan Fallowell was awarded the English PEN/Ackerley Award last summer for his book How To Disappear: A Memoir for Misfits [Kindle], which finally is out in the US now. Jury chair Peter Parker said the work "is a subtle, beautifully written and often very funny example of autobiography by stealth. The fact that this book, having been turned down by numerous major publishers, was taken up by a small independent company is particularly heartening in the current climate." 

Selecting it among the Guardian's best of 2011, Alan Hollinghurst called Fallowell's book "brilliant and haunting." Richard Canning said it's "magical, original, and unforgettable," and Sebastian Shakespeare said it's "quirky, quixotic, and glorious fun." Even more pithily, Jonathan Keates deemed it "Sebald with laughs."

The key words here are Sebald and "autobiography by stealth" because four of the five chapters are, ostensibly, profiles of other people, including: Alastair Graham, the inspiration for Sebastian Flyte in Brideshead Revisited; Bapsy Pavry, the Bombay-born reclusive Marchioness of Winchester; and a mad German artist named Marlin Eckhard Maruma who bought an island in the Hebrides called Eigg until the locals banded together and bought it back.

Reviewing it for the Daily Express, Christopher Silvester said the book offers "polished jewels of consciousness, presented with this author's trademark mixture of profundity, wit and joyful naughtiness. They drink the elixir of loss, though with an eye fixed on the horizon." James Magruder blurbed it, "A strange and wonderful book. Fallowell is a marvelous raconteur who seems incapable of writing a dull sentence."