Paperback review: How to Disappear In this quirky book (winner of the 2012 PEN/Ackerley Prize), Duncan Fallowell describes a series of journeys to remote locations - from an Indian hill town to the Outer Hebrides - and the characters he meets. I didn't always find Fallowell's eccentric interlocutors - who include Alastair Graham, model for Evelyn Waugh's Sebastian Flyte - as fascinating as he evidently does. Nevertheless, his prose can be wonderful. He writes like a spikier Sebald, alternating between acerbic witticisms and passages of voluptuous description: "In how many tropical and subtropical rooms like this have I slugged from a bottle, or daydreamed ... the mind adrift with trains of thought flowing like silken scarves into empty spaces."