Winner of the 2012 PEN Ackerley Prize Duncan Fallowell sets out to odd corners of the world in pursuit of some extraordinary and improbable characters who were in most cases momentarily famous--or infamous--and then simply disappeared. The first to disappear is the author himself--to a ghostly hotel on a Mediterranean island. His subjects, though unmet or hardly met, live for the reader with remarkable vividness, such as the German artist who...