What Disappears is a gripping multi-generational tale that begins in Tsarist Russia in the late 19th century and ends in Paris with the start of the First World War. Jeannette Dupres, one of two identical twins born to a Jewish family in dire political and financial straits, is spirited away as an infant by a Catholic family in France. The other twin, Sonya Luria, who was told her sister died at birth, has her life upended by the 1903 pogrom in Kishinev. The sisters are reunited in the doorway of Anna Pavlova's dressing-room, when they both get jobs in Paris with Sergei Diaghilev's Ballets Russes, Sonya as a seamstress and Jeannette as an extra ballerina. In a relationship that ebbs and flows as it evolves, the twins' deepest, darkest secrets and dearest hopes are revealed, affecting not only them but also leaving their mark on the lives and fates of Sonya's three daughters. Peopled by the greatest dancers, artists, writers, designers, and trend-setters of the Belle...

In this enthralling new novel, Barbara Quick re-creates eighteenth-century Venice at the height of its splendor and decadence. A story of longing and intrigue, half-told truths and toxic lies, Vivaldi's Virgins unfolds through the eyes of Anna Maria dal Violin, one of the elite musicians cloistered in the foundling home where Antonio Vivaldi--known as the Red Priest of Venice--is maestro and composer. Fourteen-year-old Anna Maria, abandoned at the Ospedale della PietÀ as an infant, is determined to find out who she is and where she came from. Her quest takes her beyond the cloister walls into the complex tapestry of Venetian society; from the impoverished alleyways of the Jewish Ghetto to a masked ball in the company of a king; from the passionate communal life of adolescent girls competing for their maestro's favor to the larger-than-life world of music and spectacle that kept the citizens of a dying republic in thrall. In this world, where for fully half the...