by Ottessa Moshfegh
Named One of the Best Books of the Summer by: New York Magazine, Time Magazine, Town & Country, Marie Claire, Refinery 29, PopSugar, the Today Show, and more
From
one of our most ceaselessly provocative literary talents, a novel of
haunting metaphysical suspense about an elderly widow whose life is
upturned when she finds an ominous note on a walk in the woods.
While
on her daily walk with her dog in a secluded woods, a woman comes
across a note, handwritten and carefully pinned to the ground by stones.
"Her name was Magda. Nobody will ever know who killed her. It wasn't me. Here is her dead body."
But there is no dead body. Our narrator is deeply shaken; she has no
idea what to make of this. She is new to this area, alone after the
death of her husband, and she knows no one.
Becoming obsessed
with solving this mystery, our narrator imagines who Magda was and how
she met her fate. With very little to go on, she invents a list of
murder suspects and possible motives for the crime. Oddly, her
suppositions begin to find correspondences in the real world, and with
mounting excitement and dread, the fog of mystery starts to fade into
menacing certainty. As her investigation widens, strange dissonances
accrue, perhaps associated with the darkness in her own past; we must
face the prospect that there is either an innocent explanation for all
this or a much more sinister one.
A triumphant blend of horror, suspense, and pitch-black comedy, Death in Her Hands asks
us to consider how the stories we tell ourselves both reflect the truth
and keep us blind to it. Once again, we are in the hands of a narrator
whose unreliability is well earned, and the stakes have never been
higher.