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A bracing novel that asks how far we would go for the ones we love―and what we would do to destroy the ones we hate.
Lisa has lost custody of her young twin boys. Caught between the French legal system's sluggish bureaucracy and her sinister, scheming in-laws, she's alone and lost, an Argentine migrant in rural France picking grapes for a pittance, only allowed to see her children in supervised visits once a month. Scapegoated and outcast, destitute and desperate, Lisa decides to take radical action: early one morning, she sneaks into her in-laws' farmhouse, takes back her children, sets the barn ablaze, and makes her escape. What follows is a white-knuckled road trip that explores human beings pushed to the edge.
Clearly, Lisa is not in her right mind, and as Harwicz deftly mingles a chorus of contradictory voices into her very unreliable narration, the reader comes to regard the protagonist with an unsettling mixture of sympathy and suspicion. Written in savage, chiseled prose, Unfit shoots off, a gripping chase that questions all our assumptions―and points out our hypocrisies―about motherhood, custody rights, love, violence, antisemitism, and migration. The latest novel by the acclaimed author of Die, My Love (soon to be adapted to a film starring Jennifer Lawrence), Unfit is addictively terrifying, savagely sophisticated, and shockingly brilliant.
"Harwicz spins an unrelenting tale of a migrant woman who takes drastic steps to fulfill her radical conception of motherly love…Harwicz's assured pacing is bolstered by her gorgeous and often darkly funny prose, immaculately translated by Mendez Sayer. The result is a wild and unforgettable ride." —Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"There is no question or fear about whether something terrible will occur, only the straight and dreadful flight toward it. So assured is the totality of destruction that the author need not name its cause. A violent, delirious blur." —Kirkus Reviews
"Celebrating lust and bolshiness with an intensity worthy of Clarice Lispector." ―The Times Literary Supplement (UK)
"Dangerously addictive." ―The Guardian (UK)
This information about Unfit was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
The fiercely independent writer and thinker Ariana Harwicz (b. 1977, Argentina) studied comparative literature at the Sorbonne. The author of Die My Love, Feebleminded, and Precious, Harwicz has been translated into 20 languages, and Die, My Love was longlisted for the Booker International Prize.
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