Death in Her Hands
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Death in Her Hands
Buy Now for £12.99
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Narrated by:
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Anne Marie Lee
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By:
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Ottessa Moshfegh
About this listen
Brought to you by Penguin.
From the Booker-shortlisted author of Eileen, a novel of haunting metaphysical suspense
While on her daily walk with her dog in the nearby woods, our protagonist comes across a note, handwritten and carefully pinned to the ground with stones. Her name was Magda. Nobody will ever know who killed her. It wasn't me. Here is her dead body.
Shaky even on her best days, she is also alone, and new to this area, having moved here from her long-time home after the death of her husband, and now deeply alarmed. Her brooding about the note grows quickly into a full-blown obsession, as she explores multiple theories about who Magda was and how she met her fate. Her suppositions begin to find echoes in the real world, and the fog of mystery starts to form into a concrete and menacing shape. But is there either a more innocent explanation for all this, or a much more sinister one – one that strikes closer to home?
In this triumphant blend of horror, suspense, and pitch-black comedy, we must decide whether the stories we tell ourselves guide us closer to the truth or keep us further from it.
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Critic reviews
"Moshfegh is one of the most original and astute young novelists working today." (Orlando Bird)
"Routinely hailed as one of the most exciting young American authors working today... Her work takes dirty realism and makes it filthier. But it is is also beautiful...the depravity of her material matched by the purity and precision of her prose." (Lisa Allardice)
"Ottessa Moshfegh's Death in Her Hands is a new kind of murder mystery... The work of a writer who is, like Henry James or Vladimir Nabokov, touched by both genius and cruelty... Like a surgeon, or a serial killer, Moshfegh flenses her characters, and her readers, until all that's left is a void. It's the amused contemplation of that void that gives rise to the dark exhilaration of her work -- its wayward beauty, its comedy, and its horror." (Kevin Power)
Impelled to write a review
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It's a sad and lonely uneasy sort of book and not for people who want everything wrapped up neatly by the end, but the clues are all there if you want to make your own decisions and a firm ending would ruin the atmosphere.
What it does do is play out a compelling small scale mystery in the mind of an increasingly unreliable narrator haunted by a cast of characters she barely interacts with and presided over by her dead German husband.
There are a few sections that are genuinely cinematic in a bizarre indie horror way, that sets you up with uneasy scenes without them descending into cheap scares.
I'd rank this between Eileen and My Year of Rest and Relaxation in the three of the four of her novels I've read in terms of how much I enjoyed it, but it's weird style will keep it in my head for some time to come.
Something Different
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Great writing, annoying character
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