Harwicz spins an unrelenting tale of a migrant woman who takes drastic steps to fulfill her radical conception of motherly love… Harwicz's assured pacing is bolstered by her gorgeous and often darkly funny prose, immaculately translated by Mendez Sayer. The result is a wild and unforgettable ride.
— Publishers Weekly (starred review)
A bracing novel that asks how far we would go for the ones we love—and what we would do to destroy the ones we hate
Lisa has lost custody of her young twin boys. Caught between the French legal system’s sluggish bureaucracy and her sinister, scheming in-laws, she’s alone and lost, an Argentine migrant in rural France picking grapes for a pittance, only allowed to see her children in supervised visits once a month. Scapegoated and outcast, destitute and desperate, Lisa decides to take radical action: early one morning, she sneaks into her in-laws’ farmhouse, takes back her children, sets the barn ablaze, and makes her escape.
What follows is a white-knuckled road trip that explores human beings pushed to the edge. Clearly, Lisa is not in her right mind, and as Harwicz deftly mingles a chorus of contradictory voices into her very unreliable narration, the reader comes to regard the protagonist with an unsettling mixture of sympathy and suspicion. Written in savage, chiseled prose, Unfit shoots off, a gripping chase that questions all our assumptions—and points out our hypocrisies— about motherhood, custody rights, love, violence, anti-semitism, and migration. The latest novel by the acclaimed author of Die, My Love (soon to be adapted to a film starring Jennifer Lawrence), Unfit is addictively terrifying, savagely sophisticated, and shockingly brilliant.
Harwicz spins an unrelenting tale of a migrant woman who takes drastic steps to fulfill her radical conception of motherly love… Harwicz's assured pacing is bolstered by her gorgeous and often darkly funny prose, immaculately translated by Mendez Sayer. The result is a wild and unforgettable ride.
— Publishers Weekly (starred review)
There is no question or fear about whether something terrible will occur, only the straight and dreadful flight toward it. So assured is the totality of destruction that the author need not name its cause. A violent, delirious blur.
— Kirkus Reviews
Dangerously addictive.
— The Guardian
Celebrating lust and bolshiness with an intensity worthy of Clarice Lispector.
— The Times Literary Supplement
An immersive fever dream. Harwicz masterfully presents controlled chaos, capturing the intense desperation of a mother separated from her young children.
— Terry Hong, Shelf Awareness
In this short, captivating read, Harwicz offers no resolution, no redemption, no comfort. Readers, however, are rewarded by a work that doesn’t flinch from wrestling with difficult questions, including whether there is a clear border where love and devotion end, and obsession and destruction begin.
