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  • Death in Her Hands

  • A Novel
  • Written by: Ottessa Moshfegh
  • Narrated by: Ann Marie Lee
  • Length: 7 hrs and 51 mins
  • 3.5 out of 5 stars (12 ratings)

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Death in Her Hands

Written by: Ottessa Moshfegh
Narrated by: Ann Marie Lee
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Publisher's Summary

"[An] intricate and unsettling new novel.... Death in Her Hands is not a murder mystery, nor is it really a story about self-deception or the perils of escapism. Rather, it's a haunting meditation on the nature and meaning of art." (Kevin Power, The New Yorker)

From one of our most ceaselessly provocative literary talents, a novel of haunting metaphysical suspense about an elderly widow whose life is upturned when she finds an ominous note on a walk in the woods.

While on her daily walk with her dog in a secluded woods, a woman comes across a note, handwritten and carefully pinned to the ground by stones. "Her name was Magda. Nobody will ever know who killed her. It wasn't me. Here is her dead body." But there is no dead body. Our narrator is deeply shaken; she has no idea what to make of this. She is new to this area, alone after the death of her husband, and she knows no one.

Becoming obsessed with solving this mystery, our narrator imagines who Magda was and how she met her fate. With very little to go on, she invents a list of murder suspects and possible motives for the crime. Oddly, her suppositions begin to find correspondences in the real world, and with mounting excitement and dread, the fog of mystery starts to fade into menacing certainty. As her investigation widens, strange dissonances accrue, perhaps associated with the darkness in her own past; we must face the prospect that there is either an innocent explanation for all this or a much more sinister one.

A triumphant blend of horror, suspense, and pitch-black comedy, Death in Her Hands asks us to consider how the stories we tell ourselves both reflect the truth and keep us blind to it. Once again, we are in the hands of a narrator whose unreliability is well-earned, and the stakes have never been higher.

©2020 Ottessa Moshfegh (P)2020 Penguin Audio
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What the critics say

"Cleverly unraveling, linguistically brilliant, and limning the limits of reality, [Death in Her Hands] will speak to fans of literary psychological suspense." (Booklist)

"An eerie and affecting satire of the detective novel." (Kirkus, starred review)

"No one’s work inspires better discussion than Ottessa Moshfegh’s. It seems that for every person who loves her work, there’s someone who completely disagrees - which is, in my opinion, one of the best things about reading. Her latest is a sinister tale of an elderly widow who finds a distressing note pinned to a tree near her new neighborhood." (BookPage)

What listeners say about Death in Her Hands

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    3 out of 5 stars
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    1 out of 5 stars

What the heck?

This story was a lot of nothing. Terrible ending and long drawn out story about nothing. I almost returned it after a couple chapters but read the summary again and decided to wait for it to get good. It did not. Very disappointed by that waste of time.

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  • Overall
    1 out of 5 stars
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not worth the time!

while the performance was good and the story seemed intriguing from the start the ending was absolutely not satisfying and left me regretting wasted time. I feel it was demeaning the to main character who I came to like.

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