Losing your mind won’t save you either

»Back then, when everything was different, when they still didn’t know anything about anything and their imaginations were wide open, they were given two prophecies: first, one day you will be very happy, and second, everything perishes.«

The little town slung in the valley like in a hammock – a town without a name, that could be anywhere. One day, in the surrounding forest, they spot »those responsible«, with the plans for a recreation area – they’re going to build a dam, flood the valley – along with everything in it:

The house where the adolescent twins Jula and Jules, for whom life in the countryside doesn’t mean renouncing utopia, were born; Ernst’s grave, where Greta, the eldest, mourns for her love and ponders the quickest way to join him; the headless stone lion in front of the town hall that cannot protect David from his father the mayor; and the blue fox painted by the youngest, Marie, and which henceforth skulks through the forests.

How will the townsfolk resist the disappearance of their home and their histories? And who in the end will be free enough to begin a new life?

As if Hansel and Gretel had found their way to Macondo, as if Pedro Páramo had been written by Miranda July: Before It All Disappears is a bright spark of a novel, wonderfully strange and luminously powerful. A tale of dark secrets and desperate hopes. Deeply poignant, unexpectedly funny – the way life is.