Deliver Me
Longlisted for the Saltire Society Fiction Book of the Year 2024
Format:Paperback
Publisher:Verve Books
Published:27th Jun '24
Should be back in stock very soon
At a meatpacking facility in Missouri, Dee-Dee and her coworkers kill and butcher 40,000 chickens in a single shift.
The work is repetitive and brutal, with each stab and cut a punishment to her hands and joints, but Dee-Dee's more concerned with what is happening inside her body. After a series of devastating miscarriages, Dee-Dee has found herself pregnant, and she is determined to carry this child to term.
Dee-Dee fled the Pentecostal church years ago, but judgment follows her in the form of regular calls from her mother, whose raspy voice urges her to quit living in sin and marry her boyfriend, Daddy, an underemployed ex-con with an insect fetish. With a child on the way, at long last Dee-Dee can bask in her mother and boyfriend's newfound attention. She will matter. She will be loved. She will be complete.
When her charismatic friend Sloane reappears after a twenty-year absence, feeding her insecurities and awakening suppressed desires, Dee-Dee fears she will go back to living in the shadows. Neither another miscarriage nor Sloane's own pregnancy deters her: she must prepare for the baby's arrival.
To read the work of Elle Nash is to be restored to faith in the wildness, wetness, and visceral power of contemporary American fiction. Deliver Me is a barbed liturgy of bugs, babies, meat, the gospel, women lusting women, women lusting men, and the human body. Get saved -- Melissa Broder, author of Milk Fed and Death Valley
A horror with heart... The various strands of Deliver Me are nicely woven together, bringing out themes of motherhood, yearning, jealousy, the meat industry and American-made religion. There is an emotional depth to Nash's novel that does not take away from, but rather adds to, the horror that lies at its centre * Dazed *
Deliver Me is pure jaw-dropping horror while also serving up a piercing insight into the control of women's bodies and the expectations placed upon them. Mixing single-minded maternal desire with religion in the deep south, Nash's ending is one you will never forget * Stylist *
Nash takes no prisoners in this visceral slice of body horror that mixes up pregnancy, poverty and Pentecostalism. It's a hot mess of a novel coolly rendered. Which just makes the horror of it cut even deeper * Herald (Top 10 Summer Reads) *
Deliver Me by Elle Nash takes chances with thrilling results... demonstrating an ever-improving sense of craft... There is a slowly creeping dread that builds as the narrative twists and turns to a satisfying and shocking climax. Throughout, Nash feels like a writer completely in control of her story * Big Issue *
ISBN: 9780857308610
Dimensions: unknown
Weight: unknown
288 pages