by Eva Baltasar
First published 2023
A woman with suicidal impulses guards herself from the world while surrendering completely to sex with other women, literature, and art. She allows no one close yet craves intensity in every encounter. Meanwhile, a ship's cook abandons her life of solitude and fleeting relationships when love strikes. She leaves the sea behind, moves into domestic life, and commits to assisted reproduction and raising a child. In the third story, a woman feels trapped by modern existence and escapes to complete isolation in the countryside. Surrounded by emptiness, her instincts sharpen and her consciousness shifts toward something unrecognizable. Each protagonist confronts the boundaries between freedom and connection, pleasure and pain, wildness and domesticity. Their bodies become battlegrounds where desire meets resistance, where intimacy threatens to destroy the very defenses that keep them alive.
Genres: literary-fiction, contemporary
Vibes: dark, intimate, thought-provoking
Tropes: character-study, emotional-journey
320 pages · Paperback · Random House
Content warnings: sexual-content, suicide