"Stop this at once!" father yelled at me, but I just couldn't stop my tics. "Can't you hear?" "Enough!" mom stepped in. "He's not able to control it, and you know it very well." Father stopped yelling. He muttered: "Then he'll have to learn to control it." This emotionally jarring episode happened to Adam, the main protagonist of (In)Visible, a Ukrainian novel by Ivan Baidak. Diagnosed with Tourette's syndrome as a teenager, Adam, now a 26-year-old freelance designer, looks back at his rollercoaster relationship with an abusive father and guides the reader through his more recent experiences. He attends his first meeting of a therapy group for people with disfiguring disorders and meets Eva, Marta, and Anna.

Shaped after the writer's own experience of living with Tourette's syndrome, Adam tries to move from self-inflicted invisibility to being visible--in his family, career, and personal life. His straightforward conversations with Eva, a makeup artist, Anna, a charity worker, and Marta, a TV anchor, pull the curtains aside to show us how these young people go about their daily lives in a society that has a long way to go in terms of tolerance and acceptance. A tapestry woven out of four stories, the novel lets us hear the voices of millennials pushing against othering and struggling to accept--and love--their bodies as they are. I picked this book up because I felt a strong urge to give its protagonists voices in English. Louder voices to enter a global conversation around disability and representation. Exploring a lesser-known Ukrainian context, the novel adds to the discourse of disability writers sharing their stories. David Mitchell co-translating The Reason I Jump and Alice Wong and a constellation of writers behind Disability Visibility are some of the first that spring to mind when thinking about potential 'conversation partners.' The novel has already inspired artists to bring the narrative out of the book and 'translate' it into a dance performance and a visual arts exhibition--which only speaks for its urgency.