SAVAGE TONGUES
A new novel by PEN/Faulkner Award winner Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi, “written with the intensity of early Marguerite Duras and Ferrante’s Days of Abandonment,” about a young woman caught in an affair with a much older man, a personal and political exploration of desire, power, and human connection (The Millions).
It’s summer when Arezu, an Iranian American teenager, goes to Spain to meet her estranged father at an apartment he owns there. He never shows up, instead sending her a weekly allowance, care of his step-nephew, Omar, a forty-year-old Lebanese man.
A new novel by PEN/Faulkner Award winner Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi, “written with the intensity of early Marguerite Duras and Ferrante’s Days of Abandonment,” about a young woman caught in an affair with a much older man, a personal and political exploration of desire, power, and human connection (The Millions).
It’s summer when Arezu, an Iranian American teenager, goes to Spain to meet her estranged father at an apartment he owns there. He never shows up, instead sending her a weekly allowance, care of his step-nephew, Omar, a forty-year-old Lebanese man. As the weeks progress, Arezu is drawn into a mercurial, charged, and ultimately catastrophic affair with Omar, a relationship that shatters her just at the cusp of adulthood.
Two decades later, Arezu inherits the apartment. She returns with her best friend, Ellie, an Israeli-American scholar devoted to the Palestinian cause, to excavate the place and finally put to words a trauma she’s long held in silence. Together, she and Ellie catalog the questions of agency, sexuality, displacement, and erasure that surface as Arezu confronts the ghosts of that summer, crafting between them a story that spans continents and centuries.
Equal parts Marguerite Duras and Shirley Jackson, Rachel Cusk and Samanta Schweblin, Savage Tongues is a compulsive, unsettling, and bravely observed exploration of violence and eroticism, haunting and healing, and the profound intimacy born of the deepest pain.
- Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
- Hardcover
- August 2021
- 288 Pages
- 9780358315063
Buy the Book
$24.00
About Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi
Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi is the author of the novels Savage Tongues, Call Me Zebra, and Fra Keeler and the director of the MFA Program in Creative Writing at the University of Notre Dame. She is a National Book Foundation “5 Under 35” honoree and the winner of a 2019 PEN/Faulkner Award, a John Gardner Award, and a 2015 Whiting Award, as well as the recipient of a Fulbright Fellowship and residency fellowships from MacDowell and Ledig House. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, the Paris Review, Guernica, Granta, Bomb, and elsewhere. She lives in Chicago and is the founder of Literatures of Annihilation, Exile and Resistance, a lecture series on the global Middle East that focuses on literature shaped by colonialism, military domination, and state-sanctioned violence.
Praise
Most Anticipated Book of the Summer from Vulture, Refinery29, Lit Hub, and Hey Alma
Most Anticipated Book of the Year from Harper’s Bazaar, Lit Hub, and The Millions
“A love story of the most fevered, brutal order…The prose is propulsive, erotic, and darkly dreamlike, recalling the early novels of Marguerite Duras…[SAVAGE TONGUES] interrogates the narratives we assign to the past and asks what we are allowed to expect of those who love us.” —Vulture
“Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi’s stunning new novel is a hauntingly beautiful depiction of the way past traumas grip at our insides, threatening to tear us apart years after we’ve experienced them…Savage Tongues is rigorous in its exploration of the effects that violence and corruption have on our conception of ourselves.” —Refinery29
“This is a pulls-no-punches look at abandonment, ownership, trauma, and the convergence of political and personal pain. It is also a touching ode to friendship, a partial salve for these wounds.” —Lit Hub
“Written with the intensity of early Duras and Ferrante’s Days of Abandonment…With the help of a dear friend, Arezu excavates and puts words to her past trauma in this novel about love, friendship, identity, and displacement.” —The Millions
“A luxuriant fevered quest for reclamation, Savage Tongues is political, poetical, and spooky good.” —Joy Williams