The Diver's Clothes Lie Empty

'Part glamorous travelogue, part slow-burn mystery, this full-bodied tale of a runaway is at once formally inventive and heartbreakingly familiar... (It's also insanely funny.)' -- Lena Dunham



From the acclaimed author of Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name and The Lovers comes a tensely drawn, spellbinding literary thriller.

In Vendela Vida's taut and mesmerizing novel of ideas, a woman travels to Casablanca, Morocco, on mysterious business. Almost immediately, while checking into her hotel, she is robbed, her passport and all identification stolen. The crime is investigated by the police, but the woman feels there is a strange complicity between the hotel staff and the authorities-she knows she'll never see her possessions again.

Stripped of her identity, she feels both burdened by the crime and liberated by her sudden freedom to be anyone at all. Then, a chance encounter with a film crew provides an intriguing opportunity: A producer sizes her up and asks, would she be willing to be the body-double for a movie star filming in the city? And so begins a strange journey in which she'll become a stand-in-both on-set and off-for a reclusive celebrity who can no longer circulate freely in society while gradually moving further away from the person she was when she arrived in Morocco.



Vendela Vida is the author of the acclaimed novels

And Now You Can Go,

Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name and

The Lovers. She is a founding editor of

The Believer magazine, and the editor of

The Believer Book of Writers Talking to Writers. She lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with her husband and children.



This enigmatic psychological thriller...puts the reader squarely in the shoes of the protagonist, making this already taut mystery thriller an even more intense read.



Full of surprises, it demands to be read in one go.



A thriller-taut story of a crisis of identity and opportunity, full of lies, shadows and subterfuge.



An intoxicatingly strange quest for anonymity... What emerges from this shifting, uncertain terrain is a novel of sublime unease and delicious bewilderment. You are not yourself, and it is wonderful.



Ms Vida's novel portrays with cool wit and suspense the explosive emancipation of a woman who is finally empowered to grab some warmth, drama, magic for herself.



[An] intimate and understated tale...powerful and empowering, thanks to the author's innate skill.



Very funny...

The Diver's Clothes Lie Empty is also moving, clever and bright as a button.