Blue Hunger by Viola Di Grado longlisted for Polari Book Prize 2024

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.