Malén Denis’s Lithium is a novel about what cannot be fully named or pinned down. “Language,” the author notes, acts “in this book as a pharmakon—both poison and remedy—inviting the reader to navigate its ambivalence. I wrote it by following the golden thread of poetry and the echoes of psychoanalysis, letting the images lead rather than the plot.” Lithium employs an especially potent, poetic language to convey love found and love lost (I’m waiting for news from you). It is a book blazing with bruised perceptions of the precarity of a life lived between jobs and between homes; it’s a feverish work swinging from hope to despair, of trying drugs both prescribed and not, of migration, of cat-sitting, and of isolation, of the search for meaning and for happiness when both prove so elusive, and it is about summoning the strength to reach from indecision to decision.