An electrifying descent from loneliness and grief into obsessive, all-consuming love, by an Italian literary star.

When Xu bites Ruben, when she has her in her teeth, naked and bad on top of her, everything is good. In their skyscraper apartment, overlooking Shanghai’s blue-tinged, pulsating nightlife, they swallow the little yellow pills that will make all things dangerous feel safe.

In abandoned factories and dilapidated slaughterhouses, Xu pushes Ruben to extremes of pleasure and pain that she has never experienced before, to a place where language breaks down and passion becomes consumption.

Blue Hunger asks how we create our identities and how we escape them; it is a fever-dream of a novel, propulsive and uncanny, that demolishes all taboos.

‘Viola Di Grado is, most importantly, a powerful and original writer; the fact that she also writes, movingly and with complexity, about members of the LGBT population, renders her work all the more singular.’ -Michael Cunningham, author of The Hours