A tense, provocative and nuanced novel about a rape accusation in an idyllic commune from the author of the 2024 International Booker Prize-longlisted Lost on Me
I was in my sixth month when the girl came knocking.
The girl came empty handed. On the threshold, her hair down, her jeans tight.
'Are you the professor’s wife?' the girl asked me. 'I have to speak to you,' she said.
'The professor raped me,' the girl said.
While on vacation on an idyllic island called Miden, a seemingly aimless woman meets an attractive man and leaves her country to be with him. A few months later, newly pregnant and just beginning to feel comfortable in her lover’s space, her life is upended when a girl arrives at the door.
Slight and pretty, the girl discloses a drawn out and violent affair she’s had with her professor, the father of the woman’s unborn child. In alternating perspectives, the professor and his girlfriend reflect upon their lives, each other, and their interloper. As the community gathers testimony and considers the case, the couple is forced to confront their own paranoia, fetishes, and transgressions in light of the student’s accusations.
Provocative and unnerving, The Girl at the Door explores the bureaucracy of a scandal, and the thin line between lust and possession. In an age in which blunt power and fickle nuance take turns upon the stage, Raimo has delivered an intoxicating exploration of the politics and power of sex.
Veronica Raimo is the author of four novels, the most recent of which, Lost On Me was longlisted for the 2024 International Booker Prize, shortlisted for the Premio Strega Prize and won the Strega Off Prize, the Strega Giovani Prize and the Viareggio Rčpaci Prize. She wrote the script for Marco Bellocchio’s Bella addormentata. She has written for a number of Italian publications and contributes regularly to Rolling Stone, and her translations into Italian include works by F Scott Fitzgerald, Octavia E. Butler, Ray Bradbury and Ursula K. Le Guin. She lives in Rome.