The Alphabet of Vanishing

Some mysteries survive because no one has solved them. Others survive because someone made certain they could not be solved. Four years after a disastrous academic claim nearly destroyed his career, linguist Craig Kader is given an unexpected chance at redemption: a fellowship studying one of history's most baffling objects — the Voynich Manuscript, a fifteenth-century book filled with unknown writing, impossible plants and strange diagrams that have resisted interpretation for centuries. Craig knows better than anyone what obsession can cost. This time, he intends to follow only what the evidence can prove. Centuries earlier, Agata, a young healer in Renaissance Italy, had learnt a different lesson about knowledge. In a world where a woman's skill can become evidence against her, what she knows must be recorded carefully — and sometimes hidden even more carefully. As Craig begins to recognise patterns others have overlooked, the distance between researcher and writer starts to narrow. But the closer he comes to understanding what the manuscript was for, the more difficult the real question becomes: Does every secret need to be revealed? Moving between modern-day Melbourne and fifteenth-century Italy, The Alphabet of Vanishing is a dual-timeline literary mystery about lost voices, dangerous knowledge, academic obsession, and the difference between something forgotten and something deliberately concealed.