Carole David's The Year of My Disappearance is a searing, surreal, darkly comic descent into a woman's psyche: as pitiless an assault on her own torments and pretences as it is on those figures lodged in her memory: lovers, strangers, her own mother, Bosch-like apparitions out of her dreams and imaginings. Through it all, a fierce combat is being waged between immolation and survival, wherein, as she has written, "I gave free range to the lives that dwelt within me." Nothing and no one is spared in this book, and yet it is wonderfully invigorating.