The Girl at the Door by Veronica Raimo

The Girl at the Door by Veronica Raimo

A tense, provocative and nuanced novel about a rape accusation in an idyllic commune from the author of the 2024 International Booker Prize-longlisted Lost on Me I was in my sixth month when the girl came knocking. The girl came empty handed. On the threshold, her hair down, her jeans tight. 'Are you the professor’s wife?' the girl asked me. 'I have to speak to you,' she said. 'The professor raped me,' the girl said. While on vacation on an idyllic island called Miden, a seemingly aimless woman meets an attractive man and leaves her country to be with him. A few months later, newly pregnant and just beginning to feel comfortable in her lover’s space, her life is upended when a girl arrives at the door. Slight and pretty, the girl discloses a drawn out and violent affair she’s had with her professor, the father of the woman’s unborn child. In alternating perspectives, the professor and his girlfriend reflect upon their lives, each other, and their interloper. As the community gathers testimony and considers the case, the couple is forced to confront their own paranoia, fetishes, and transgressions in light of the student’s accusations. Provocative and unnerving, The Girl at the Door explores the bureaucracy of a scandal, and the thin line between lust and possession. In an age in which blunt power and fickle nuance take turns upon the stage, Raimo has delivered an intoxicating exploration of the politics and power of sex.

‘An astonishing novel that examines moral anguish from original and captivating angles, full of quotable lines and startling insights into conscience and the urge to judgeThe Girl at the Door explores the limits of intimacy, physical and emotional, and is as gripping as anything I’ve read this year. Sexy, dangerous, modern – what’s not to love?’ Richard Beard

‘This uncompromising, fiercely intelligent novel confirms the moral usefulness of serious art: it reminds us that the world is more complicated than our righteous certainties; it forces us to acknowledge the abyss’ Garth Greenwell, author of What Belongs to You

‘A profoundly feminist tale about how to grapple with what we already know’ Jezebel

‘Fierce, intelligent, candid, and erotic, Veronica Raimo has written a devastating modern fable of passion, where acts of betrayal, violence, and sex both sustain and destroy the characters’ lives in unexpected and provocative ways’ Lily Tuck

‘The first post-Weinstein novel’ Vanity Fair

‘Elegant, mesmerizing and merciless’ La Repubblica

‘Veronica Raimo’s novel will enrich the debate on the most current contemporary issues and at the same time belongs to the international literary scene that today can talk about
emotions, individuals and sex in the most interesting and stylistically innovative way: from Catherine Lacey to Sally Rooney’ Vice

‘Haunting … a book about harassment, consensus, and vigilantism that has caught the zeitgeist of the times’ Vogue

‘Will be talked about for a long time’ Esquire

Veronica Raimo is the author of two novels published in Italy and a collection of short stories published in Germany. She wrote the script for Marco Bellocchio’s Bella addormentata. She has written for a number of Italian publications and contributes regularly to Rolling Stone. She has translated from English to Italian writers such as F Scott Fitzgerald, Octavia Butler, Iain Sinclair, Vikram Seth, and others. She lives in Rome.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9780008326364
ISBN 10	0008326363
Title	The Girl at the Door
Author	Veronica Raimo
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Paperback
Publisher	HarperCollins Publishers
Year published	2020-08-20
Number of pages	224
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.