Overview

Leaving behind a nomadic and dangerous career as a journalist, Sarah DeVaughan returns to India, the country of her childhood and a place of unspeakable family tragedy, to help preserve the endangered Bengal tigers. Meanwhile, at home in Kentucky, her sister, Quinn--also deeply scarred by the past and herself a keeper of secrets--tries to support her sister, even as she fears that India will be Sarah's undoing. As Sarah faces challenges in her new job--made complicated by complex local politics and a forbidden love--Quinn copes with their mother's refusal to talk about the past, her son's life-threatening illness, and her own increasingly troubled marriage. When Sarah asks Quinn to join her in India, Quinn realizes that the only way to overcome the past is to return to it, and it is in this place of stunning natural beauty and hidden danger that the sisters can finally understand the ways in which their family has disappeared--from their shared history, from one another--and recognize that they may need to risk everything to find themselves again. With dramatic urgency, a powerful sense of place, and a beautifully rendered cast of characters revealing a deep understanding of human nature in all its flawed glory, Katy Yocom has created an unforgettable novel about saving all that is precious, from endangered species to the indelible bonds among family.

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Set partly in India, in a tiger preserve, and partly in the middle-class America of Louisville, Katy Yocom's courageous novel Three Ways to Disappear brings us closer to our ancient kinship with the environment. Can there be not just a mystical connection but a net of shared dependencies among species? Whether in India or Kentucky, how does the traditional family unit both imprison and sustain its members? Yocom offers an exciting and suspenseful, high-stakes narrative in language both rich and precise. Her characters are as real as the person sitting next to you or looking at you in the mirror. -- Sena Jeter Naslund, author of Ahab's Wife; Abundance, a Novel of Marie Antoinette; and The Fountain of St. James Court, or Portrait of the Artist as an Old Woman Three Ways to Disappear begins with a focused lens on the endangered Bengal tiger then expands its reach with every page to reveal the interconnectedness of the natural world and fragility of all life. Weaving together the worn threads of ecological balance, this ambitious and moving novel addresses scarcity, climate change, family dynamics, cultural conflict, human accountability, women's economic autonomy, and most of all, love, in all its wondrous forms. This is a story not just about saving the tigers, but ourselves. -- JoeAnn Hart, author of Addled and Float

In Katy Yocom's immersive and multi-layered novel Three Ways to Disappear, Sarah and Quinn confront painful childhood truths and address their neglected sisterhood ... Authentic relationships drive the story. Indian regions and the conservation park themselves function as characters, along with tigers Machli and Akbar ... Three Ways to Disappear is informative [and] refreshingly complex ... -- Foreword Reviews Set partly in India, in a tiger preserve, and partly in the middle-class America of Louisville, Katy Yocom's courageous novel Three Ways to Disappear brings us closer to our ancient kinship with the environment. Can there be not just a mystical connection but a net of shared dependencies among species? Whether in India or Kentucky, how does the traditional family unit both imprison and sustain its members? Yocom offers an exciting and suspenseful, high-stakes narrative in language both rich and precise. Her characters are as real as the person sitting next to you or looking at you in the mirror. -- Sena Jeter Naslund, author of Ahab's Wife; Abundance, a Novel of Marie Antoinette; and The Fountain of St. James Court, or Portrait of the Artist as an Old Woman Three Ways to Disappear begins with a focused lens on the endangered Bengal tiger then expands its reach with every page to reveal the interconnectedness of the natural world and fragility of all life. Weaving together the worn threads of ecological balance, this ambitious and moving novel addresses scarcity, climate change, family dynamics, cultural conflict, human accountability, women's economic autonomy, and most of all, love, in all its wondrous forms. This is a story not just about saving the tigers, but ourselves. -- JoeAnn Hart, author of Addled and Float What a fabulous ride! The characters--both human and tiger--are so alive they practically leap off the page. The drama feels absolutely real. And the urgency of the book's message has never been greater. -- Sy Montgomery, author of The Soul of an Octopus and The Good Good Pig

Author Information

Katy Yocom's fiction, poetry, and essays have appeared in Salon, The Louisville Review, decomP magazinE, Midlife at the Oasis, and elsewhere. Her short fiction has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, and her poetry has been translated into Bulgarian. Her novel, Three Ways to Disappear, won the Siskiyou Prize for New Environmental Literature and was a finalist for the Dzanc Books Disquiet Open Borders Book Prize and the UNO Press Publishing Lab Prize. Katy is a 2019 recipient of the Al Smith Fellowship Award for artistic excellence from the Kentucky Arts Council. She has received grants from the Kentucky Foundation for Women and the Elizabeth George Foundation as well as writing residencies from Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts and Crosshatch Hill House. She holds an MFA in writing from Spalding University, co-directs the Spalding at 21c reading series in Louisville, and serves on the board of the Kentucky Women Writers Conference. She lives with her husband and animal companions in Louisville, where she is associate director of Spalding's low-residency MFA in Writing program.

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