Die My Love

A manic, bruising stream of conscious portrayal of a mother and wife struggling to maintain both a normal life and her sanity.

Man Booker International Prize 2018 Finalist

In a forgotten patch of French countryside, a woman is battling her demons: embracing exclusion yet wanting to belong, craving freedom whilst feeling trapped, yearning for family life but wanting to burn the entire house down. Given surprising leeway by her family for her increasingly erratic behaviour, she nevertheless feels ever more stifled and repressed. Motherhood, womanhood, the banality of love, the terrors of desire, the brutality of ‘another person carrying your heart forever’: Die, My Love faces all this with a raw intensity. It’s not a question of if a breaking point will be reached, but rather when, and how violent a form will it take?

It’s impossible to come out unscathed from reading Ariana Harwicz. The language of Die, My Love cuts like a scalpel even as it attains a kind of cinematic splendour, evoking the likes of John Cassavetes, David Lynch and John Ford. In a text that explores the destabilising effects of passion and its absence, immersed in the psyche of a female protagonist always on the verge of madness (in the tradition of Sylvia Plath and Clarice Lispector), Harwicz moulds language, submitting it to her will in irreverent prose. Bruising and confrontational, yet anchored in an unapologetic beauty and lyricism, Die, My Love is a unique reading experience that quickly becomes addictive.

Man Booker International Prize (Longlist)
Society of Authors Valle-Inclán Prize (Shortlist)
Best Translated Book Award (Finalist)
Internationaler Literaturpreis (Shortlist)
Republic of Consciousness Prize (Shortlist)

"A touch of David Lynch." —The Guardian

"Celebrating lust and bolshiness with an intensity worthy of Clarice Lispector." —The Times Literary Supplement

"The over-all effect is exacting…. And yet “Die, My Love” isn’t truly beholden to plot. The thrill is in the human as animal, and even as parasite." —The New Yorker

"Die, My Love is impressive for the force of the narrator’s insatiable rage, which fragments the boundaries of the self. [Anne Enright]" —New York Review of Books

"Unrestrained and unadorned, Harwicz’s writing has a wild beauty.... A portrait of motherhood, passion, and mental illness that cuts to the bone." —Kirkus

"We are used to female narrators who occupy one of several familiar niches: blandly ‘likeable’, ‘flawed’, or pathological; murderers or abusers who are profiled with just enough sympathy to make us feel humane as we judge them. Harwicz takes us somewhere more profound and forces us to confront the thought that these easy fictional ‘explanations’ are specious. Lurking inside all of us is the potential for horror."" —Hari Kunzru , author of THE IMPRESSIONIST and GODS WITHOUT MEN

"The prose of Ariana Harwicz embarks on a vertiginous linguistic journey that joyfully shreds all vestiges of common sense."" —María Sonia Cristoff , author of FALSE CALM

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Praise for Ariana Harwicz

"Dangerously addictive." —The Guardian

"A precise, intense, ruthless mosaic that demands we read carefully, never quickly." —Literary Hub

"Celebrating lust and bolshiness with an intensity worthy of Clarice Lispector." —The Times Literary Supplement

"Harwicz succeeds in luring the reader into the darker aspects of the