Viola Di Grado offers us a brilliant, highly immersive story about the need to consume and be consumed, love, messiness, and the power of language. In Jamie Richards’ translation of Viola Di Grado’s Blue Hunger, a young woman embarks on a feverish love affair with an illusive yet capricious vagabond in Shanghai. Blue Hunger is a most vibrant novel about lust: beautifully written and full of sensuous images, Viola Di Grado’s book is a powerful literary journey into food and sex and the city.

A danse macabre for the millenials … In Hollow Heart, Di Grado elegantly and playfully thematises the emptiness of unquestioned vessels of meaning (which is to say, words) with the story of a girl who has taken her own life before she has even really lived it. It also explores language, particularly the gaps in between Chinese and Italian (the novel is translated from Italian), and how language impacts self and identity, and the narrator's views of different cultures. The grammatical difference between doing something and already having done it, between past, present, and future, is located outside the verb.

Over all of it loomed the Oriental Pearl Tower: a red orb in steel lattice, topped by a tall obelisk. Now the buildings contained newspaper offices, multinational corporations, TV stations – economic paradise. I thoroughly recommend Blue Hunger by Italian novelist Viola Di Grado, translated by Jamie Richards.

Eradicating everything, reaching into the heavens with glass and steel, reaching like a demon pleading for light. Read more about the condition New: A new, unread, unused book in perfect condition with no missing or damaged pages. As I stepped out on to the dark street, and she handed her phone to the driver to pay, I touched my face to find a tear. The love is unrequited, yet Ruben is determined to exercise her obsession, insisting on disappearing herself to dampen her grief. From one of Italy's most electrifying voices, a fearless story of queer love and obsession set against the glassy surfaces of Shanghai.In a skyscraper apartment overlooking Shanghai's blue-tinged, pulsating nightlife and filled with rotting food, two women swallow little yellow pills that will make all things dangerous feel safe. What I loved, what I hated, the idiocies I said to myself in the mirror sometimes like I’d seen people do on TV. Every morning, the old women cried in the bath like little girls and the old men unbuttoned their pants and said obscene things to me. Di Grado’s] black comedy, pungent metaphors, and controlled ambiguity announce the arrival of a considerable talent.