Description

Dive into this gloriously sordid story of love and murder on the high seas.

Somewhere in the Indian Ocean, 1851: McGlue is down in the hold, still too drunk to be sure of his name, situation or orientation – but he has blood on his hands. He may have killed a man. That man may have been his best friend. As the ship makes its voyage home to Salem, Massachusetts, intolerable memory accompanies reluctant sobriety.

A-sail on the high seas of literary tradition, Ottessa Moshfegh gives us a nasty heartless blackguard on a knife-sharp voyage through the fogs of recollection.

‘One of America’s most exciting – and most provocative – young novelists’ Financial Times

‘You’re in safe, if sticky, hands… A wild ride’ The Times

Publisher Review

Wonderful * Guardian * Strange and beautiful * LA Times * A gorgeously sordid story of love and murder on the high seas and in reeky corners of mid-nineteenth-century New York and points North. McGlue is a wonderwork of virtuoso prose and truths that will make you squirm and concur You’re in safe, if sticky hands with an Ottessa Moshfegh story… Everything bulges and reeks in this novella, which feels as if it was written in a permanent state of nausea… The plot spins faster than its main character’s head. What elevates this novella are the scalpelsharp observations about McGlue’s nihilism and her prose, which is as distilled as the liquor McGlue necks. It’s a wild ride. * The Times * Moshfegh is… a superlative short-story writer… McGlue, which owes as much to Cormac McCarthy as it does to Poe or Melville, is an entertaining curio with some lovely baroque flourishes. * Independent *