Death In Her Hands – Otessa Moshfegh

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Chosen by Rachel

An investigation of an elderly woman’s mental wanderings after finding a note referring to a murder.

⫸ “Vesta Gul is an expected Moshfegh character: a female loner with convoluted, dangerous thoughts. She is 72, living alone in the woods after the death of her husband, with only her dog Charlie for company.

“After discovering a note in the woods that reads ‘Her name was Magda. No body will ever know who killed her. It wasn’t me. Here is her dead body’, Vesta starts a crusade to discover the truth about Magda. However, her over imagination gets away with her to the point it is difficult to work out what is real and what is imagined.

“But this is fiction, so everything is imagined, and Magda is as much a character as Vesta. As such, it becomes a kind of post-modern scrutiny of the processes of fiction writing, with a power play of narrative authority between Otessa Moshfegh writing Vesta Gul, and Vesta Gul writing Magda.”

⫸ “A fabulous study of loneliness and of the impact of living with an oppressor on the psyche. Vesta slowly reveals the details of her suffocating marriage at the same time as she imagines the life of the unknown Magda. The two are clearly linked. Her obsession with the murder allows Vesta the same freedoms and clarity as she has given her imagined Magda and so her unreliability deepens. Death In Her Hands is a dark, mysterious novel which I found compelling as a character study on madness. I could not predict the outcome and had to invest time and effort into working out what was real and what was imagined. I really enjoyed it.” – Rachel

⫸ “Reading this book over a relatively short period of time I almost felt like I was experiencing the same uncertainty and confusion as the main character Vesta. As we moved into her spiralling thoughts I felt increasingly uncomfortable – I was less concerned with ‘solving the mystery’ and more worried for her wellbeing. Overall it was a very compelling read. Side note – this is the second fictional dog called Charlie I have come across where things have not gone well for the owner (I’m looking at you A Star is Born).” – Suzy

⫸ “The protagonist started off as someone who seemed sane and quite interesting, though somewhat neurotic, and her gradual slide downhill into incoherence was convincingly portrayed. It was often difficult to interpret what was real and what wasn’t and this added to the intrigue. Revelations about Vesta’s marriage became darker and darker as we moved through the book. It was almost as if she was slowly choosing to open up to the reader, revealing more intimate details as the story unfolded. The novel had a great ending that was sad but strangely satisfying.” – Jo

⫸ “I appreciated the concept of the novel which is essentially a story within a story and found that quite interesting. The second half of the story became more thrilling as Vesta’s mental health began to decline and her confused state led us into the sometimes dark, sometimes pitiful meanderings of her mind. A clever and well written book but to be honest it wasn’t really for me.” – Jodie

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Published 2020
Penguin Press
259 pages