Viola Di Grado – författare

An Irish Times Book of the YearAn 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.

From one of Italy''s most electrifying voices, a fearless story of queer love and obsession set against the glassy surfaces of Shanghai."Blue Hunger is irresistible, evocative, dripping with desire, and brilliantly written-Viola Di Grado is a genius."-Jami AttenbergAfter her twin''s death, a solitary young woman leaves Rome for Shanghai, the city where her brother Ruben had long dreamed of opening a restaurant. Teaching Italian to Chinese students, she meets a mysterious girl named Xu, who is also running from a turbulent past: a violent father, an absent mother, and an extended family who wishes she''d been a boy. Xu''s house is dingy and full of rotting food, like a museum of decomposing organic matter. In the gloom of abandoned textile factories and dilapidated slaughterhouses, the two discover an extreme dimension where biting, swallowing, and taking each other in are part of the erotic ritual. Rooted in an experience of cultural limbo, Blue Hunger takes the reader on a visually stunning, taboo-demolishing journey into the depths of the psyche, from mourning to falling in lust-all in a city of potent dreams, stories, and stimulations.