But her goal isn't to lull us to sleep it's to wake us up.

'A recent profile of Moshfegh in this newspaper suggested that her stories of detachment are perfectly suited to this moment of global isolation. 'A searching portrait of grief, loneliness and the comforts of storytelling.' - Huffington Post Named a Best Book of 2020 by Elle, Bustle, and the New York Public Library Once again, we are in the hands of a narrator whose unreliability is well earned, and the stakes have never been higher. As her investigation widens, strange dissonances accrue, perhaps associated with the darkness in her own past we must face the prospect that there is either an innocent explanation for all this or a much more sinister one.Ī triumphant blend of horror, suspense, and pitch-black comedy, Death in Her Hands asks us to consider how the stories we tell ourselves both reflect the truth and keep us blind to it. Oddly, her suppositions begin to find correspondences in the real world, and with mounting excitement and dread, the fog of mystery starts to fade into menacing certainty. With very little to go on, she invents a list of murder suspects and possible motives for the crime. She is new to this area, alone after the death of her husband, and she knows no one.īecoming obsessed with solving this mystery, our narrator imagines who Magda was and how she met her fate. Our narrator is deeply shaken she has no idea what to make of this. Here is her dead body.' But there is no dead body. While on her daily walk with her dog in a secluded woods, a woman comes across a note, handwritten and carefully pinned to the ground by stones. Her brooding about the note grows quickly into a full-blown obsession: who was Magda and how did she meet her fate?From the Booker-shortlisted author of Eileen.Named a Most Anticipated Book of 2020 by: The Washington Post, Vogue, Marie Claire, Entertainment Weekly, The Millions, New York Magazine, Paste Magazine, LitHub, E! News Online, and many moreįrom one of our most ceaselessly provocative literary talents, a novel of haunting metaphysical suspense about an elderly widow whose life is upturned when she finds an ominous note on a walk in the woods. Here is her dead body.Shaky even on her best days, Vesta is also alone, and new to the area, having moved here after the death of her husband. A glorious visceral mystery' The TimesWhile on her daily walk with her dog in the woods near her home, Vesta comes across a chilling handwritten note. 'This is a story about what might happen when a woman takes charge.

Death in her hands novel