Blue Hunger

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.

'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

'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

'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