Nymph - by Stephanie Lacava (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

A literary thriller with an unconventional love story that follows a female assassin as she navigates her family's secrets from best-selling author of I Fear My Pain Interests You.

Not yet thirty, Bathory, or 'Bat' to those near to her, has assembled a peculiar CV: Model, sex worker, linguist, Latin scholar. Nothing in her lively job history employs the skill set she inherited from her strange family, chief among them an uncanny ability to sidestep seemingly certain death(s). Her clan are assassins, albeit of a romantic bent.

As a child, Bat's lonely games would mimicked spycraft and wetwork, while her parents issued theories on love and death. As an adult, she is set on swerving any enduring romantic loves, which entails managing to avoid that one alluring figure from her father's past. She is equally intent on dying young, a notably less difficult thing to avoid with her heritage. But when the past inevitably resurfaces, Bat's twin devotions to death and detachment are compromised.

LaCava's new novel is a thriller, examining violence through its subversion; and a love story about the impossibility of denying (the magic of) human connection.

Review Quotes

"A visceral, exorcism-like exploration of a body blunted to pain and a mind moulded by generational trauma, lust, and dysfunction ... sensual, slippery and stylish."
--Ana Cafolla, The Face

"A sharp critical vision lurches into focus: of culture as commodity, of suffering as currency, and of the female body as this agon's generalized battleground."
--Tom Mc Carthy

"I haven't read a book in a while that just pulled me in, and you're so immersed in the characters and in the world. It's quite a slice of life"
--Kaia Gerber, Vanity Fair

"La Femme Nikita meets Bridges of Madison County"
--Marlowe Granados

About the Author

Stephanie LaCava is a writer based in New York City. I Fear My Pain Interests You was released to global acclaim in 2022. Her debut novel, The Superrationals, was published by Semiotext(e) in 2020.