Lapvona by Ottessa Moshfegh

Lapvona by Ottessa Moshfegh

An Instant New York Times Bestseller

Lapvona flips all the conventions of familial and parental relations, putting hatred where love should be or a negotiation where grief should be . . . Through a mix of witchery, deception, murder, abuse, grand delusion, ludicrous conversations, and cringeworthy moments of bodily disgust, Moshfegh creates a world that you definitely don't want to live in, but from which you can't look away. --The Atlantic

In a village in a medieval fiefdom buffeted by natural disasters, a motherless shepherd boy finds himself the unlikely pivot of a power struggle that puts all manner of faith to a savage test, in a spellbinding novel that represents Ottessa Moshfegh's most exciting leap yet

Little Marek, the abused and delusional son of the village shepherd, never knew his mother; his father told him she died in childbirth. One of life's few consolations for Marek is his enduring bond with the blind village midwife, Ina, who suckled him when he was a baby, as she did so many of the village's children. Ina's gifts extend beyond childcare: she possesses a unique ability to communicate with the natural world. Her gift often brings her the transmission of sacred knowledge on levels far beyond those available to other villagers, however religious they might be. For some people, Ina's home in the woods outside of the village is a place to fear and to avoid, a godless place.

Among their number is Father Barnabas, the town priest and lackey for the depraved lord and governor, Villiam, whose hilltop manor contains a secret embarrassment of riches. The people's desperate need to believe that there are powers that be who have their best interests at heart is put to a cruel test by Villiam and the priest, especially in this year of record drought and famine. But when fate brings Marek into violent proximity to the lord's family, new and occult forces upset the old order. By year's end, the veil between blindness and sight, life and death, the natural world and the spirit world, will prove to be very thin indeed.

Ottessa Moshfegh is a Boston-based fiction writer. Fence, Noon, Vice, The Paris Review, and other literary publications and online journals have published her short stories. She received the Plimpton Discovery Prize for her stories in The Paris Review last year, as well as the Modern Prize in Prose from Fence Books, which will publish her first novel, McGlue, in November 2014. The National Endowment for the Arts recently awarded her a creative writing fellowship. She has a BA in English from Barnard College and an MFA in creative writing from Brown University, and she is currently a Wallace Stegner fellow at Stanford University, where she is working on a new novel and a collection of short stories. She lives in Oakland, California.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9780593300268
ISBN 10	0593300262
Title	Lapvona
Author	Ottessa Moshfegh
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Hardback
Publisher	Penguin Putnam Inc
Year published	2022-06-21
Number of pages	320
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.