Blue Hunger
An Irish Times Book of the Year
An electrifying descent from loneliness and grief into obsessive, all-consuming love, by an Italian literary star.
'When Xu bites me, when she has me in her teeth, naked and bad on top of me, everything is good.'
In a skyscraper apartment overlooking Shanghai's blue-tinged, pulsating nightlife and filled with rotting food, two women swallow little yellow pills that will make all things dangerous feel safe. They're both running from a turbulent past.
In abandoned factories and dilapidated slaughterhouses, Xu pushes Ruben to extremes of pleasure and pain that she has never experienced before, to a place where language breaks down and passion becomes consumption.
Blue Hunger asks how we create our identities and how we escape them; it is a fever-dream of a novel, visionary and uncanny, that demolishes all taboos and wisely explores, in a wildly imaginative language, the twisted peaks of loss and desire.
Review:
'I thoroughly recommend Blue Hunger by Italian novelist Viola Di Grado, translated by Jamie Richards. Di Grado's prose is clean, efficient, and devastating as she explores queer love, displacement, and grief against the backdrop of Shanghai.'
-- Martin Doyle * The Irish Times *'To read Blue Hunger is to enter a dreamlike state, guided by irresistible, evocative writing, immaculate details, and vivid emotions dripping with desire. Viola Di Grado offers us a brilliant, highly immersive story about the need to consume and be consumed, love, messiness, and the power of language. Blue Hunger is a wholly compelling piece of art, and Viola Di Grado is a genius.'
-- Jami Attenberg, author of The Middlesteins'Viola Di Grado is, most importantly, a powerful and original writer; the fact that she also writes, movingly and with complexity, about members of the LGBT population, renders her work all the more singular.'
-- Michael Cunningham, author of The Hours'Blue Hunger is a devastating study of the ways in which grief renders everything, even the self, foreign. A gorgeous grotesquerie of lust and despair backdropped by the writhing rhythms of Shanghai.'
-- Rachel Yoder, author of Nightbitch'Di Grado is a real writer, so everything under the spell of her words is vibrant and evocative. Blue Hunger, a prose poem and a fearless descent into language and the realm of meanings, is about our experience in the acidic lights of the contemporary world.'
-- FIlippo La Porta * La Repubblica *'Sticky, neon, and electric, Blue Hunger drips with desire, danger, and hunger in myriad forms.'
-- Jessica Andrews, author of Saltwater'Blue Hunger's is a disorientating world made strange by grief - a world where words have lost their meaning, and identity fragments. In luminous and startling prose, Viola Di Grado lays bare the risk inherent in human relationships, the capacity we have to inflict and enjoy pain as well as pleasure, and the disassembling power of grief. Bold and addictive, this is a carnal, sensual, drug-and-sex-infused trip of a novel.
-- Imogen Crimp, author of A Very Nice Girl'Blue Hunger is a most vibrant novel about lust: beautifully written and full of sensuous images, Viola Di Grado's book is a powerful literary journey into food and sex and the city. In depicting the constant foreignness of falling in love, Di Grado reveals herself as a true master of style.'
-- Claudia Durastanti, author of Strangers I Know and Cleopatra Goes to Prison'Haunting ... An erotic and disturbing depiction of the effects of grief.'
* Kirkus Reviews *'Readers will be fascinated by the novel's scenery, psychological acuity ... Queerness, grief, isolation, dependence, and love merge in this novel of geographically-based healing and descent.'
* Booklist *'Blue Hunger is a breezy yet dizzying fever-dream of a read. The narrator's voice is deceptively quiet. The book feels like it has a flame lighting it from underneath. It moves with a steady, compact agility, like a ship gesturing towards a mid-sea battle ... The final scene is a spectacular feat, managing to be both unexpected, and exquisitely tender.'
-- Jessie Tu * The Sydney Morning Herald *'The language of Blue Hunger has a tour de force energy ... Di Grado's prose is exhilaratingly dynamic, made up of fragmented paragraphs that look and sound like prose poetry and that use poetic language in surprising and edgy ways. The translator, Jamie Richards, has done an excellent job in keeping up ... Although Blue Hunger reads as an exercise in style, there is also substance here, particularly when it comes to the self-destructiveness so often bound up with what we call love.'
-- Maria Takolander * The Saturday Paper *'A sensuous and biting account ... It's worth indulging in this visceral story.'
* Publishers Weekly *'Italian author Viola Di Grado simulates the fever dreamlike state of an all-consuming love.'
* RUSSH *'It's lush, dreamlike, and once started, you won't be able to stop thinking about it.'
-- Terri Schlichenmeyer * Los Angeles Blade *'[T]his short but electrifying book captures the life of a young Italian woman in Shanghai as she finds herself captivated by a beautiful, enigmatic woman named Xu ... Blue Hunger goes on to explore identity in a writhing blend of lust and pain ... Her strength as a writer lies in the layers of metaphors that weave into a narrative fabric thick with intertwined meaning ... [A] dizzying, intricate study of grief, displacement, obsession and desire under the glittering veneer of Shanghai.'
-- Fruzsina Gal * Aniko Press *'Translated by Jamie Richards, the writing is simply gorgeous, luring the reader in even as the plot takes some decidedly visceral turns ... It's a fever-dream of a novel, a breathless, erotic, and often uncomfortable examination of what grief, loneliness, and a desperate search for answers can do ... its combination of rich, evocative writing, and oft unsettling content makes it near impossible to look away from the page.'
-- Jodie Sloan * The AU Review *Praise for Hollow Heart:
'A danse macabre for the millenials ... In Hollow Heart, Di Grado elegantly and playfully thematises the emptiness of unquestioned vessels of meaning (which is to say, words) with the story of a girl who has taken her own life before she has even really lived it.'
* LA Review of Books *Praise for Hollow Heart:
'The writing is pristine. Each sentence lures us further into the flies and blood-filled spirals of Di Grado's dreamworld and, most importantly, we are willing to follow her.'
* The Independent *Praise for 70% Acrylic 30% Wool:
'Viola Di Grado's charming prose romps through chthonic worlds of nibbling insects, ammoniac seepage, and shattering depression, using language that is both glib and scrumptious.'
* Music & Literature *Praise for 70% Acrylic 30% Wool:
'[Di Grado's] black comedy, pungent metaphors, and controlled ambiguity announce the arrival of a considerable talent.'
* Times Literary Supplement *
Prizes: Short-listed for The Polari Book Prize 2024 (UK). Long-listed for Nota Bene Prize 2024 (UK).