Uncompromising, provocative, and thought-provoking.
Hayes probes the intersections of faith, power, sexuality, and trauma with unflinching intensity in this challenging and intellectually ambitious novel. Through the posthumous reconstruction of a diary, the narrative examines the life of Mary Armstrong, the daughter of a prominent U.S. senator whose untimely death leaves behind a body of undated entries. Arranged by her closest friend, these fragments form a disquieting meditation on forbidden intimacy, religious belief, and the struggle to locate meaning after betrayal.
The novel adopts an epistolary framework that allows Hayes to merge confession, commentary, and philosophical inquiry. Mary’s voice—brilliant, obsessive, and often unsettling—drives the book, drawing the reader into a dense interior landscape shaped by childhood trauma and sustained intellectual fervor. Her reflections range widely across theology, classical philosophy, psychoanalysis, linguistics, myth, and Western political history, forming a worldview in which the sacred and the erotic collapse into one another.
Hayes is less concerned with narrative momentum than with psychological and ideological excavation. The prose is deliberately essayistic, at times confrontational, mirroring Mary’s relentless need to interrogate the structures that shaped her life. Secondary characters—family members, lovers, and the narrator herself—function primarily as forces acting upon Mary rather than fully autonomous figures, and thus reinforcing the novel’s focus on interiority and power. The material is frequently disturbing, and Hayes offers no consoling resolutions. Instead, the novel insists on ambiguity, forcing readers to confront how personal trauma can metastasize into sweeping, destabilizing theories about religion, morality, and society itself.
Lovers of finely crafted, dense literary fiction who prefer intellectual risk and psychological depth over narrative comfort will find plenty to admire.
Pub date June 4, 2025
ISBN 978-1968296339
Price $33.85 (USD) Hardcover, $26.86 Paperback, $9.99 Kindle edition
