In his second novel, Disappearance, the prize-winning Guyanese poet David Dabydeen provides a richly layered poetic evocation of landscape and history, memory and change. Telling the story of a brief relationship between a young Guyanese engineer and the old woman he lodges with while building sea defences for a cliff-top village near Hastings, the novel uses metaphors of building and architecture to explore not only the experience of empire, but also the fragility of all imperial monuments to withstand the "timeless barrenness" of the land and the impermanence of memory, whether in the Caribbean, Africa or in England. Dabydeen's concern with the connections between the "monstrosity" of imperialism and its "nostalgia for the monumental" with how people use rituals of commemoration to construct continuous narratives of self considers how national sentiments come to reside in a nation's architectural heritage. After hearing his landlady's tales of her years in Africa, the engineer meditates on whether, in memory, one can ever finally "get rid of the past". That question, at the heart of this powerful and moving relationship, comes down to the protagonist's shared concern with how we use disguises to mask our erasures and to keep at bay the sense that something is missing, excised, disappeared from the narratives we tell ourselves. In those disappearances, Dabydeen masterfully charts not only the integrity of land and memory but also the state of the nation as a whole. --David Marriott