Lapvona (Signed Book)

by Ottessa Moshfegh

Overview

Notes From Your Bookseller

We’re so, so excited to have a new, sometimes shocking, genre-bending novel from Ottessa Moshfegh, author of the critically acclaimed #booktok hit My Year of Rest and Relaxation. 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. This is a book of spells and stories, faith and power with an unforgettable young boy at its heart.

NAMED A MOST ANTICIPATED BOOK OF 2022 BY The Millions, Harper's Bazaar, New York Magazine, LitHub, AV Club, and more

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780593493939
Publisher:	Penguin Publishing Group
Publication date:	06/21/2022
Edition description:	Signed Edition
Pages:	320
Product dimensions:	8.90(w) x 6.10(h) x 1.10(d)

About the Author

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.

Editorial Reviews

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

From the Publisher

01/01/2022

International award winner Cercas expands to literary suspense inEven the Darkest Night, featuring a young ex-con who read Les Misérables in jail and after the murder of his sex-worker mother joins the Barcelona police and is sent to investigate a particularly brutal double murder outside the city. In another genre blender, the New York Times best-selling Crosley purveys humor, psychological twistiness, and strong writing to create what could be a Cult Classic featuring a woman who leaves a work dinner to buy cigarettes and encounters a string of ghostly ex-boyfriends (100,000-copy first printing). From Dermansky (e.g., the multi-best-booked The Red Car), Hurricane Girl sends 32-year-old Allison Brody from the West Coast to the East Coast, where she buys a small house on the beach and is promptly hit by a Category 3 hurricane that leaves her with a bleeding head and some very confused thoughts. Following Delicious Foods, which boast PEN/Faulkner and Hurston/Wright Legacy honors, Hannaham's Didn't Nobody Give a Shit What Happened to Carlotta features a woman who transitioned in prison and is finally released after more than two decades, returning apprehensively to a New York she barely knows and a family that doesn't understand her (40,000-copy first printing). Winner of the Publishing Triangle's Bill Whitehead Award for Lifetime Achievement, Holleran returns after 13 years with The Kingdom of Sand, whose nameless narrator has survived the death of friends from AIDS and his parents from old age and tragedy and is surviving his own end time by enjoying classic films and near-anonymous sexual encounters (50,000-copy first printing). In Laskey's So Happy for You, following Center for Fiction First Novel finalist Under the Rainbow, Robin and Ellie have always been best friends, but queer academic Robin has her doubts about being maid of honor in Ellie's forthcoming wedding. In the medieval-set Lapnova, from ever-edgy, New York Times best-selling Moshfegh, hapless shepherd's son Marek—close only to a midwife feared for her ungodly way with nature—is caught up in the violence surrounding a cruel and corrupt lord. In this follow-up to Newman's multi-starred The Heavens, all The Men in the world mysteriously vanish at once, leaving women both to grieve and to rebuild. Prix Marguerite Yourcenar winner Nganang follows up hisLJ best-booked When the Plums Are Ripe with A Trail of Crab Tracks, whose protagonist slowly reveals his story—and the story of Cameroon's independence—on a prolonged stay with his son in the United States. The dedicated assistant principal at a New Jersey public high school thinks she has a lock on the principal's job when the current principal retires, but alas for the durable protagonist of Perrotta's Election, Tracy Flick [still] Can't Win (300,000-copy first printing). In Thrust, a motherless child from the late 21st century learns that she can connect with people over the last two centuries, from a French sculptor to a dictator's daughter; from Yuknavitch, a Brooklyn Public Library Literary Prize finalist.

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