An Instant New York Times Bestseller!
"Lapvona flips all the conventions of familial and parental relations, putting hatred where love should be or a negotiation where grief should be . . . Through a mix of witchery, deception, murder, abuse, grand delusion, ludicrous conversations, and cringeworthy moments of bodily disgust, Moshfegh creates a world that you definitely don't want to live in, but from which you can't look away." -The Atlantic
In a village in a medieval fiefdom buffeted by natural disasters, a motherless shepherd boy finds himself the unlikely pivot of a power struggle that puts all manner of faith to a savage test, in a spellbinding novel that represents Ottessa Moshfegh's most exciting leap yet
Little Marek, the abused and delusional son of the village shepherd, never knew his mother; his father told him she died in childbirth. One of life's few consolations for Marek is his enduring bond with the blind village midwife, Ina, who suckled him when he was a baby, as she did so many of the village's children. Ina's gifts extend beyond childcare: she possesses a unique ability to communicate with the natural world. Her gift often brings her the transmission of sacred knowledge on levels far beyond those available to other villagers, however religious they might be. For some people, Ina's home in the woods outside of the village is a place to fear and to avoid, a godless place.
Among their number is Father Barnabas, the town priest and lackey for the depraved lord and governor, Villiam, whose hilltop manor contains a secret embarrassment of riches. The people's desperate need to believe that there are powers that be who have their best interests at heart is put to a cruel test by Villiam and the priest, especially in this year of record drought and famine. But when fate brings Marek into violent proximity to the lord's family, new and occult forces upset the old order. By year's end, the veil between blindness and sight, life and death, the natural world and the spirit world, will prove to be very thin indeed.
An Instant New York Times Bestseller!
"Lapvona flips all the conventions of familial and parental relations, putting hatred where love should be or a negotiation where grief should be . . . Through a mix of witchery, deception, murder, abuse, grand delusion, ludicrous conversations, and cringeworthy moments of bodily disgust, Moshfegh creates a world that you definitely don't want to live in, but from which you can't look away." -The Atlantic
In a village in a medieval fiefdom buffeted by natural disasters, a motherless shepherd boy finds himself the unlikely pivot of a power struggle that puts all manner of faith to a savage test, in a spellbinding novel that represents Ottessa Moshfegh's most exciting leap yet
Little Marek, the abused and delusional son of the village shepherd, never knew his mother; his father told him she died in childbirth. One of life's few consolations for Marek is his enduring bond with the blind village midwife, Ina, who suckled him when he was a baby, as she did so many of the village's children. Ina's gifts extend beyond childcare: she possesses a unique ability to communicate with the natural world. Her gift often brings her the transmission of sacred knowledge on levels far beyond those available to other villagers, however religious they might be. For some people, Ina's home in the woods outside of the village is a place to fear and to avoid, a godless place.
Among their number is Father Barnabas, the town priest and lackey for the depraved lord and governor, Villiam, whose hilltop manor contains a secret embarrassment of riches. The people's desperate need to believe that there are powers that be who have their best interests at heart is put to a cruel test by Villiam and the priest, especially in this year of record drought and famine. But when fate brings Marek into violent proximity to the lord's family, new and occult forces upset the old order. By year's end, the veil between blindness and sight, life and death, the natural world and the spirit world, will prove to be very thin indeed.
Ottessa Moshfegh is a fiction writer from New England. Eileen, her first novel, was shortlisted for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Man Booker Prize, and won the PEN/Hemingway Award for debut fiction. My Year of Rest and Relaxation and Death in Her Hands, her second and third novels, were New York Times bestsellers. She is also the author of the short story collection Homesick for Another World and a novella, McGlue. She lives in Southern California.
One of "USA Today’s Best Summer Books"
One of The New Yorker’s Best Books of 2022
“The disturbing intensity of the novel hearkens to Moshfegh’s
acclaimed McGlue and Eileen, but this story feels far more riotous,
debauched and voracious.” —Washington Post
“Lapvona, is hilarious, poignant, controlled, a little nihilistic .
. . Moshfegh is sui generis, head and shoulders above most of her
peers . . . Moshfegh’s fictions are up to much more. They flirt
with nihilism but are elegantly constructed. On the content level,
they are crude, but on the aesthetic level, they are refined. The
tension caused by this, the friction, is what’s special about them.
It is the source of their dark sparkle.” —Oprah Daily
“What impresses here is not so much Moshfegh’s abilities with
character or narrative, or even her language . . . as the qualities
Lapvona shares with a Francis Bacon painting: depicting in
blood-red vitality, without morals or judgment, the human animal in
its native chaos.” —The Guardian
“The edgy novelist’s new book imagines a wholly realistic medieval
village rife with plagues and schemes and dastardly characters. She
has crafted a trenchant allegory of life in these United States
over the past several years, not coincidentally also filled with
plagues and schemes and dastardly leaders. Moshfegh makes the same
old story new by setting it in the past, wielding her pen like an
Arcimboldian brush to sketch in the mechanics of corruption.” —Los
Angeles Times
“The most addictive part of Lapvona is the same thing that draws
readers to her other works: how she renders psychological portraits
of characters that reflect our own repugnance, and therefore our
humanity . . . It’s an exercise that’s compassionate as it is
tactful, one in the tradition of Flannery O’Connor or Katherine
Dunn, a rearranging of the world so that everyone who's not a freak
is the freak . . . She’s always been good about writing about the
monstrosity within all of us, and making it normal, even making it
kind of fun.” —Nylon
“Lapvona tells the story of a shepherd’s son who comes fatally
close to the rulers of a medieval fiefdom. Moshfegh, following up
on her acclaimed My Year of Rest and Relaxation continues to plumb
entitlement and class; here, she adds magic and revenge.” —Chicago
Tribune
“Lapvona is a witty, vicious novel, frothing at the mouth at the
opportunity to indict all the worst habits and orientations of our
contemporary. . . . Moshfegh is one of our most thrilling
chroniclers of the abject—she is a delighted documentarian of all
the excrescences and defilements of the body which force us to
reckon with our inevitable decay, or what the French philosopher
Julia Kristeva might term our future-deadness. Perhaps the
great evolution at hand in Moshfegh’s ongoing corpus is the fact of
Lapvona’s rather full-throated politicism. This is at heart a fable
of haves and have nots, of the ways violent psychologies and
apparatuses of exploitation—of the poor, of resources, of women’s
bodies, of the land and earth itself—constitute a significant
stratum, if not the very bedrock, of the human condition.” —The
Observer
“Moshfegh has proven herself to be one of the most immaculate
crafters of disturbed, unreliable first-person narrators . . . .
Moshfegh’s voice is part Dostoevsky, part Poe, and entirely her own
. . . If anybody would be apt to get into the weird head space of
our current moment it’s Moshfegh.” —The Millions
“The author of My Year of Rest and Relaxation, EW's pick for the
best book of 2018, turns her inimitable lens to a medieval fiefdom
ruled by deeply tribal ideas of class, family, and faith. The
result reads like a cracked fairy tale, both familiar and
fantastically strange.” —Entertainment Weekly, "16 novels we're
excited for this summer"
“Vividly brutal and low-key fantastical new historical novel . . .
Lapvona is a sardonic multi-perspective exploration of a society
ruled by barbarity, ignorance, corruption, and religion.”
—Philadelphia Inquirer’s Summer Preview
“You won’t want to put down Lapvona, a medieval fantasy that feels
like a fairy tale adapted by Margaret Atwood or Ursula K. LeGuin.”
—Barnes & Nobles, “Our Most Anticipated New Book Releases of June
2022”
“Delightfully weird and full of the richly painted characters and
captivating story that makes Moshfegh a master of her craft, this
historical fiction throws readers back into Medieval times so
completely, you can smell the sheep dung. You'll meet a motherless
shepherd, a sadistic lord, a wet nurse with occult powers and a
priest whose own faith is tested by devastating famine and
drought.” —Good Housekeeping, “The 40 Best New Books of 2022 (So
Far) That You Won't Be Able to Put Down”
“Ottessa Moshfegh brings her trademark brutality to the Middle Ages
in this allegorical pandemic novel. . . . interrogating the role
faith plays in social and environmental abuses of power.” —Adam
Morgan, The Scientific American
“No one is quite who he first seems in the latest wicked tale from
macabre master Moshfegh . . . Sculpting an eerily canny fabular
world of contrasts and evil, cartoonish cruelty, in her signature
way, Moshfegh conjures a grotesque, disturbing story of gross
inequality and senseless strife.” —Booklist
“At once immensely alien and deeply human, Moshfegh’s latest is a
brutal, inventive novel about the ways that stories and the act of
storytelling shape us and articulate our world.” —Library Journal
(starred review)
“Deliriously quirky medieval tale . . . Moshfegh brings her
trademark fascination with the grotesque to depictions of the
pandemic, inequality, and governmental corruption, making them feel
both uncanny and all too familiar. It’s a triumph.” —Publishers
Weekly (starred review)
“One of America’s most celebrated authors continues her exploration
of what fiction has to offer with a further digression from the
standard realist purview and into fantasy. Lapvona promises to
chronicle the life of Ina, a blind midwife in a medieval village.
Ina’s talent doesn’t stop at childcare, and allows her a special
connection with the surrounding natural world. It’s a fascinating
premise, and I’m excited to see the yarn Moshfegh is able to
weave.” —Chicago Review of Books
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