Death in Her Hands by Ottessa Moshfegh

Death in Her Hands by Ottessa Moshfegh

An] intricate and unsettling new novel . . . Death in Her Hands is not a murder mystery, nor is it really a story about self-deception or the perils of escapism. Rather, it's a haunting meditation on the nature and meaning of art.
-Kevin Power, The New Yorker

From 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.

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 name was Magda. Nobody will ever know who killed her. It wasn't me. Here is her dead body. But there is no dead body. Our narrator is deeply shaken; she has no idea what to make of this. She is new to this area, alone after the death of her husband, and she knows no one.

Becoming obsessed with solving this mystery, our narrator imagines who Magda was and how she met her fate. With very little to go on, she invents a list of murder suspects and possible motives for the crime. 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. 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.

A 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. Once again, we are in the hands of a narrator whose unreliability is well earned, and the stakes have never been higher.

Ottessa Moshfegh is a fiction writer from Boston. Her short stories have appeared in Fence, Noon, Vice, The Paris Review, and various other literary magazines and online journals. Last year she was awarded the Plimpton Discovery Prize for her stories in The Paris Review, and the Modern Prize in Prose given by Fence Books, who will be publishing her first novel, McGlue, in November, 2014. She was recently granted a creative writing fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. Holding a BA in English from Barnard College and an MFA in creative writing from Brown, she is currently a Wallace Stegner fellow at Stanford, at work on a new novel and a collection of short stories, and lives in Oakland, California.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9781984879356
ISBN 10	1984879359
Title	Death in Her Hands
Author	Ottessa Moshfegh
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Hardback
Publisher	Penguin Putnam Inc
Year published	2020-06-23
Number of pages	272
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.