My Heavenly Favorite (Hardcover) (ISBN-13: 9781644452738)

A harrowing, unforgettable masterpiece by the winner of the Booker International Prize

A confession, a lament, a mad gush of grief and obsession, My Heavenly Favorite is the remarkable and chilling successor to Lucas Rijneveld's international sensation, The Discomfort of Evening. It tells the story of a veterinarian who visits a farm in the Dutch countryside where he becomes enraptured by his "Favorite"--the farmer's daughter. She hovers on the precipice of adolescence, and longs to have a boy's body. The veterinarian seems to be a tantalizing possible path out from the constrictions of her conservative rural life.

Narrated after the veterinarian has been punished for his crimes, Rijneveld's audacious, profane novel is powered by the paradoxical beauty of its prose, which holds the reader fast to the page. Rijneveld refracts the contours of the Lolita story with a kind of perverse glee, taking the reader into otherwise unimaginable spaces full of pop lyrics, horror novels, the Favorite's fantasized conversations with Freud and Hitler, and her dreams of flight and destruction and transcendence.

An unflinching depiction of abjection and a pointed excavation of taboos and social norms, My Heavenly Favorite establishes Rijneveld as one of the most daring and brilliant writers on the world stage.

Author: Lucas Rijneveld
ISBN-10: 1644452731
ISBN-13: 9781644452738
Publisher: Graywolf Press
Language: English
Published: 03/05/2024
Pages: 288
Format: Hardcover
Weight: 1.35lbs
Size: 9.10h x 6.00w x 1.30d

Review Citation(s):
Library Journal Prepub Alert 10/01/2023 pg. 5
Publishers Weekly 01/08/2024
Kirkus Reviews 01/15/2024