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Nymph:A Novel
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A thriller examining violence, through its subversion, and a singular love story
Not yet thirty, Bathory has assembled a peculiar résumé: model, sex worker, linguist, Latin scholar, and assassin. The last of these has been the family trade for generations. Growing up, Bathory, her mother, and her father made an isolated, strange, and loving — if very unusual — family unit. Her lonely childhood games mimicked spycraft and wet-work, while her parents watched and shared their arcane theories about love and death.
As a student in New York, her life changes on accepting a job at a dilapidated card shop in Manhattan. This is a front for an agency that allows her to put her inherited skills to use while pursuing romance in the city.
However, steering clear of attachment is as dangerous as anything else she does and means sidestepping a certain alluring figure from her father’s past. She is equally intent on dying young, a less difficult proposition given her heritage, the company she keeps — call girls, conflicted cops, trustfund hoodlums — and the people pursuing her.
Will Bathory escape both fate and family, or does satisfaction and salvation lie only in their embrace?
Reviews
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A visceral, exorcism-like exploration of a body blunted to pain and a mind moulded by generational trauma, lust, and dysfunction ... sensual, slippery and stylish.
, The Face -
A sharp critical vision lurches into focus: of culture as commodity, of suffering as currency, and of the female body as this agon's generalized battleground.
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I haven't read a book in a while that just pulled me in, and you're so immersed in the characters and in the world. It's quite a slice of life
, Vanity Fair
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La Femme Nikita meets Bridges of Madison County
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Reading her, I never know what to expect. She investigates unique undergrounds, interested in what is never obvious. She takes chances, risks, and never chooses the safe way.
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Reading Nymph feels like being gifted with an elegant, hypnotic glimpse into a disorienting mirror world where all is possible and all is connected. A taut exploration of fate, inevitability, violence, and the beautiful impossibility of extricating ourselves from those intimacies, and those darknesses, which can seem ordained
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Here is a novel that seems to shrug off the pain of being young and adrift in the world, while secretly, it draws you into the dark recesses of loneliness and disillusionment. I fear her book will destroy you.
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Understated and elegant, LaCava’s writing inspires both dread and longing; her characters, nearly all of them direct to the point of cruelty