From America to France and Eastern Europe to Japan, this quest for a woman who has disappeared is a psychological mystery and an architectural odyssey in one. 

Where is Alma? A future husband—No. 4—is desperately seeking his fiancée, who has disappeared. To locate her, he is interviewing her three former husbands, her sister, and ex sister-in-law. Could she be hiding in a French monastery? A Japanese shukubo (temple lodging)? Or maybe she is the victim of a belief in a Balkan creation myth? 

Written in six voices that come together in a seamless and often comical narrative,Speaking to No. 4 is both a psychological mystery and a meditation on our construction of space. As husband No. 3, the Architect, says to husband-to-be No. 4, “Think of Japanese space as a novel in which the main character is absent.”


"A strange, funny, and completely original novel. Ifland is a master satirist, an elegant plotter, and, at heart, a philosopher who brings international flair to her work." —Elizabeth McKenzie, author of The Portable Veblen, longlisted for the 2016 National Book Award for Fiction


"A highly imaginative, cunningly plotted world tour of a novel in search of its elusive heroine, the soul (appropriately named Alma). Its explorations of the interconnected realms of storytelling and desire will keep readers ensnared right up to the unexpected conclusion." —Carolyn Burke, author of No Regrets: The Life of Edith Piaf and Foursome


"I found myself reading many sentences and passages several times over, wanting to savor them. Ifland’s prose is so very good, so pleasing in its rhythms and cadences, but also in the intellectual rigor and depth conveyed. To be sure "Speaking" is a novel of ideas — something rare enough, these days — served up by articulate, thoughtful characters: an intellectual feast, "idea-packed” (as opposed to action).
 
Many metaphors spring to mind: Alma as the motionless hub at the center of the novel's swirling galaxy-wheel. Also: a verbal cubist portrait of an enigmatic woman seen from all four dimensions separately and at once. I thought too of the lost wax method of bronze casting and the plaster poured into the cavities formed by decomposed bodies at Pompeii—with each of the narrators pouring their measure of liquid plaster (intellectual, emotional, aesthetic) into Alma's absence, until at last in the final chapter she emerges, fully cast — but no less an enigma. You know you're in good novelistic hands when the metaphors and motifs all cohere and accrue, when they generate and earn compound interest.
 
Intelligent and intellectual, but not cold. There is great heart in it. The final moment in which Alma, taking a cue from her suicidal fellow hotel resident, leaps figuratively into the black television box (leaving behind, like Kotomi, an evidentiary shred of ghostly white dress), is deeply moving and apt. The wish to give oneself over completely, to be engulfed or swallowed by "the grand scheme of things" (the "grand theme" = eternity/death) … This would seem to be Alma's ultimate quest: to cease to exist—to disappear—as matter into pure spirit/intellect." —Peter Selgin, author of Duplicity and Drowning Lessons, winner of the Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction