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The Girl at the Door

Veronica Raimo author Stash Luczkiw translator

Format:Paperback

Publisher:HarperCollins Publishers

Published:20th Aug '20

Currently unavailable, currently targeted to be due back around 25th November 2024, but could change

The Girl at the Door cover

The haunting novel from the author of the 2024 International Booker Prize-longlisted Lost on Me

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

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 judge. The 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

ISBN: 9780008326364

Dimensions: 198mm x 129mm x 17mm

Weight: 200g

224 pages