Novelist to read from thriller in DUMBO

Brooklyn BookBeat

May 29, 2015 Brooklyn BookBeat

Vendela Vida will appear in DUMBO at the powerHouse Arena on June 9 for a reading of her book “The Diver’s Clothes Lie Empty.” Photo by Annabel Mehran

Share this:

“The Diver’s Clothes Lie Empty” is the fourth novel from award-winning novelist and The Believer magazine founding co-editor, Vendela Vida.

Vida will be at the powerHouse Arena at 37 Main St. in DUMBO on June 9 for a reading of her new novel.

Character-driven and psychologically penetrating, this novel of ideas set in Morocco is a spellbinding literary thriller that probes the essence and malleability of identity.

While checking into her hotel in Casablanca, a woman is robbed of her wallet and her passport — all of her money and identification. She feels burdened by the crime, yet strangely liberated by her sudden freedom to be anyone she chooses.

A chance encounter 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 impersonating the actress off the set as well. And so continues a strange and breathtaking journey full of unexpected turns, an adventure in which the woman finds herself moving irrevocably, thrillingly away from the person she once was.

“Part glamorous travelogue, part slow-burn mystery, this full-bodied tale of a runaway is at once formally inventive and heartbreakingly familiar. Through her sumptuous descriptions of Morocco and the painfully real internal monologue of her second-person narrator, Vendela Vida proves once and for all that wherever you go there, you are — but that travel has the power to awaken new selves and heal primal wounds. (It’s also insanely funny),” said Lena Dunham, author of “Not That Kind of Girl.”

Vida is the author of four previous books, including “Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name” and “The Lovers,” and is a founding editor of The Believer magazine. She is the winner of the Kate Chopin Award, which is 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.