(in)visible by Ivan Baidak
Age Group: Adult
Format: Novella
Genres and Categories: Contemporary Fiction, Chronic Illness, Mental Health, Neurodivergent, Physical Disabilities, Disabled and Neurodivergent Authors, Diversity, Mental Health Representation, OwnVoices Representation
My Rating:
Published on: 31st December 2025
Pages: 150
Disability Representation: Alopecia, Facial Haemangioma, Suicidal Ideation, Suicide Survivor, Tourette's Syndrome, Vitiligo
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Diagnosed with Tourette's syndrome as a teenager, Adam, now a 26-year-old freelance designer, attends his first meeting at a social support group. Here he meets Anna, a charity worker with a face hemangioma, Marta a TV anchor with alopecia, and Eva a make up artist with vitiligo. The following week he moves in with them.

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.

Invisible is a book about what it means to be different. A book that encourages acceptance and tolerance. A book about fear and escape, about the necessity of being loved and accepted. It's about the permanent struggle with your complexes and attempts to start loving yourself. It's about hard stories. But also about big hearts.

This book was provided for free by NetGalley and the publishers in exchange for an honest review. Many thanks to the publisher and the author for the opportunity to read this book!

Content Warnings:

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(In)Visible by Ivan Baidak starts with a scene at a family dinner where a young Adam is berated by his father for his tics. He has Tourette’s Syndrome, and despite his father demanding that he just stop, he can’t. Cut to sometime in the future, and Adam introduces himself as a graphic designer, he’s now twenty-six, he loves watching TV, and he hates shopping. He informs us he has Tourette’s Syndrome.

There’s a short break before the book begins as the author introduces himself as Ivan and having Tourette’s Syndrome. He talks about when he first realised he was different and explains that Adam’s story is not his own, it’s not a story of his own life; however, “there’s a lot of truth in it”, he points out. He also emphasises that this book is not about negative things and describes it as a “silent coming to terms with my own lived experience”.

I liked the author’s note being at the start of the book, and its placement after the “prologue” (it’s not given a title, but that is what it feels like to me) fits nicely with the flow of the book. (In)Visible is a book of stories, told through four different narratives as Adam, Anna, Marta, and Eva tell us about their conditions and their lives. It’s centred around a support group for “people with challenges”, that’s where Adam meets Anna, who invites him to move in with her and Marta, someone she also met at a support meeting. Eva is another member of their support group who lives nearby, and they become friends with her.

The book goes through each character’s narrative, continuing with Adam’s as he tells us his story. He talks about how Tourette’s Syndrome affected his life, how it prevented him from finding a job and affected his relationship with his father. He also introduces us to his friends and talks more about the support group.

The four narratives are spread out between Adam’s chapters. For the most part, his narrative remains in the present, taking us through their support group meetings, talking about their friendship and related events such as Eva’s photo exhibit. He keeps everything tied together, and in the chapters in between, his friends tell their stories. First is Eva, who developed vitiligo at eight years old, then Marta, a presenter who has alopecia and then Anna, who has a haemangioma, a benign tumour, on her cheek, which can not be surgically removed because a carotid artery runs directly through it.

Each of their narratives is different, unique, and yet tells similar stories. They are about learning to accept their illnesses, how their bodies are and dealing with how people react to their appearances, to their differences. They all have that moment when they realise that they are different, but they also have that moment when they find support, friendship and themselves.

The book starts with the beginning of their support group and ends with it. The four characters are all very different people by the time the group has ended. It’s not completely due to the support group, though, and the reason why I’ve not given this a five-star rating is that I felt some of the messages from the support group were particularly toxic. At one point, the group therapist, David, tells the group that they need not be so hard on others because they might need “more time to get used to you”. As a disabled person, I felt extremely angered by that, and while Eva shared that response, I felt that Adam’s response to it was particularly condescending. He mentions that this “ruffled Eva’s feelings”, and although he shares what Eva has to say about it, he offers no response himself.

I found the wording of the support group being for “people with challenges” to be odd. However, I recognised that this may be due to a difference in languages and cultures, as there are translators listed at the end of the book.

It’s difficult for me to put into words how emotive (In)visible was for me to read. While I identify as multi-disabled, all of my seven chronic health conditions are non-visible. Yet I’ve had someone stand and yell “diseased” at me like some of the characters of (In)visible. My heart broke so many times reading this book, and at the level of ignorance that I knew was not fiction. I’m very grateful to Baidak for writing this novel, for writing about his experience of Tourette’s Syndrome, as I know a young woman who has it. We need more books with disability representation, full stop, but after what happened earlier this year at the Oscars, I’m very glad to see alopecia representation in a book.

(In)Visible is a great read that fits so much into such a short space, which makes it wonderfully accessible, too!

About Ivan Baidak

Іvan Baidak (born in 1990) is a daring Ukrainian fiction writer and poet whose debut novel Personally Me Personally for You (2013) became a national bestseller and garnered excellent critical reviews. His two short story collections, Role Plays (2014) and The Shadows of Our Dates (2017), topped bookstore bestseller lists. His latest novel A man with my name (2019) was excellent proof of the writer’s maturity.

In 2020, he wrote a social novel about the inclusion “Invisible”, which received publicity among the elite of society. The book was recognized as one of the best in 2020 according to PEN Ukraine. There was a theater play staged based on the book, and several photo exhibitions devoted to the topic were organized. The book is translated and published in Canada (Guernica Editions), Poland (Anagram) and Italy (Fides Edizioni)

Originally from Ukraine, he’s lived in many places across the world, including Poland, Austria, Mexico, and the United States where he attended creative writing classes at the City College of San Francisco. His short stories have been translated into English, German, Serbian, Polish, Spanish, and Italian, and presented at European literary festivals.

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Thank you for reading my book review for (In)Visible by Ivan Baidak! It is due out tomorrow and is available to pre-order from any of the links in this review.

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