Violence Girl

‘Brilliantly-written characters, original and engaging. It’s so good!’ BA Paris JOANNE HAYNES HAS A SECRET. THAT IS NOT HER REAL NAME. And there’s more. Her flat isn’t hers. Her cats aren't hers. Even her hair isn’t really hers. Nor is she any of the other women she pretends to be...

How far would you go to be free? Three generations of women forge a new path through an America torn by a mysterious wave of violence in this “chilling [and] dizzyingly effective” (The New York Times Book Review) novel of revenge, liberation, and triumph. “A compulsively readable fusion...

Violence is part and parcel of human history and of human nature. It is one of our most distinctive traits, the one thing that all cultures and societies, across time, share in common. It has defined not only the ways in which individuals relate to each other, but also how collective entities and states have interacted with each other over the millennia. All societies are violent and all individuals have the capacity for violence. However, not all societies and not all individuals are equally violent, and nor does violence exist with the same intensity across cultures.

In this brave and beautiful memoir, written with the raw honesty and devastating openness of The Glass Castle and The Liar’s Club, a woman chronicles how her marriage devolved from a love story into a shocking tale of abuse—examining the tenderness and violence entwined in the relationship...