My Heavenly Favorite
A Novel
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ISBN10: 1644452731
ISBN13: 9781644452738
Hardcover
288 Pages
$28.00
CA$37.00
A confession, a lament, a mad gush of grief and obsession, My Heavenly Favorite is the remarkable and chilling successor to Lucas Rijneveld’s international sensation, The Discomfort of Evening. It tells the story of a veterinarian who visits a farm in the Dutch countryside where he becomes enraptured by his “Favorite”—the farmer’s daughter. She hovers on the precipice of adolescence, and longs to have a boy’s body. The veterinarian seems to be a tantalizing possible path out from the constrictions of her conservative rural life.
Narrated after the veterinarian has been punished for his crimes, Rijneveld’s audacious, profane novel is powered by the paradoxical beauty of its prose, which holds the reader fast to the page. Rijneveld refracts the contours of the Lolita story with a kind of perverse glee, taking the reader into otherwise unimaginable spaces full of pop lyrics, horror novels, the Favorite’s fantasized conversations with Freud and Hitler, and her dreams of flight and destruction and transcendence.
An unflinching depiction of abjection and a pointed excavation of taboos and social norms, My Heavenly Favorite establishes Rijneveld as one of the most daring and brilliant writers on the world stage.
Reviews
Praise for My Heavenly Favorite
“The style is fevered . . . exploring many of the same themes that drove Rijneveld’s first book: bucolic life, taboos, and abjection, among others.”—Dilara O’Neil, Vulture
“The audaciousness of My Heavenly Favorite lies instead in [Rijneveld's] willingness to linger inside the mind of a monster. It’s a decision that will inevitably alienate some readers, but those who stay the course will find themselves rewarded with mesmerising prose, close to transcendent in its earthiness. . . . [My Heavenly Favorite] confirms Rijneveld’s singular, deeply discomforting talent.”—Financial Times (UK)
An extraordinary literary achievement. . . . Graphic, unsettling and brilliantly written.”—The Telegraph (UK)
“A tour de force of transgressive imagination—a dazzling addition to the oeuvre of an author of prodigious gifts.”—Sandra Newman, The Guardian (UK)
“Lucas Rijneveld’s My Heavenly Favorite is a novel of exquisite discomfort and delicious poetry. Rijneveld writes with peerless moral courage and a sheer delight in the abject that we must each face in ourselves. This book unsettled me even as it made me laugh and gasp. I’m in awe.”—Brandon Taylor
“Here lies writing that is rejuvenating, glorious, brilliant. A book about obsession with prose that obsessed me from the first line. How lucky we are to be the readers of Lucas Rijneveld’s work.”—Daisy Johnson
“Daring, immediate, and insistent, My Heavenly Favorite summons a profound imagining of abuse and its ramifications. This is fiction that balances darkness and purity, deceit and reality, depravity and lyricism. Rijneveld’s control of his vision is startling. A quaking, visceral novel that demands the reader look wickedness in the eye—not for shock alone, but to provoke a genuine examination of what it is to harm and transgress.”—Rebecca Watson
“It’s been a long time since a book has destroyed me like My Heavenly Favorite. Lucas Rijneveld’s genius for minute attention to the granular detail of pain, desire, fantasy, and transgression doesn’t allow for any comfortable distance between reader and protagonist. You’re right there in it. And in Michel Hutchison’s electrifying translation it is genuinely disturbing. Rijneveld is one of the boldest writers alive today.”—Max Porter
“[Rijneveld] delivers the veterinarian’s meandering soliloquy in the style of a Beat poem, with hypnotic effect, via page-long sentences and chapter-length paragraphs. Replete with references to pop culture, rock music, and current events, the fantastical account is grounded in real possibility, making it all the more menacing.”—Kirkus Reviews
“Despite the dark subject matter, the novel’s unrelenting pace and single-paragraph structure entrance. This striking chronicle of delusion is hard to shake.”—Publishers Weekly