Death in Her Hands

Death in Her Hands by Ottessa Moshfegh is a hypnotic, deeply unsettling novel about an elderly widow who discovers a note in the woods near her new home — and becomes consumed by the mystery of who wrote it and who the dead woman named in it might be. Moshfegh’s narrator is unreliable, isolated, and increasingly detached from reality, and the novel exploits this to devastating effect: we are never entirely sure what is real and what is the projection of a grieving, lonely mind. As with My Year of Rest and Relaxation, Moshfegh is interested in psychology in extremis — in how isolation warps perception and how the desire for narrative can override the truth. Published by Vintage, this is a formally rigorous, darkly comic, and genuinely disturbing novel from one of contemporary fiction’s most uncompromising voices.