Unspeakable Things [Paperback]

Eight-year-old Maria bears witness to her family's peculiar comings and goings in early 1940s New York City and at bedtime listens to the haunting, exhilarating stories of husbands lost to the front and of a strange pact made in desperation between an exotic Hungarian countess known as the Rat and the mystic faith healer Grigori Rasputin.

From award-winning poet Kathleen Spivack comes a spellbinding and surreal debut novel about a tangled web of European emigres—including the Rat’s second cousin Herbert, a former Austrian civil servant now powerful in New York’s social scene, the Tolstoi String Quartet, who escaped to New York with their money sewn into the silk linings of their instrument cases, a German pediatrician dabbling in genetic engineering—and the strange and intoxicating secrets that bind them to each other.“Infused with the exoticism of poetry … Spivack concocts a glittering picture of many horrors, echoing the unspeakable things unfolding across the ocean, while managing to include some surprising, almost perverse tenderness.” –Mopsy Strange Kennedy,The Improper Bostonian
 
“Wildly imaginative … A stirring chronicle of survival … Heart-piercingly direct, ringing with poetry.” –Karen Campbell,Boston Globe
 
“Brilliant, vivid, entertaining, and often quite frightening … Kathleen Spivack’s poetic skills are evident in the precision and evocative language, her control of the tone—which is a harmony of darkness and wit—and her steadiness of focus on her characters.” –Claire Hopley,Washington Times
 
“Wild, erotic … daring, haunting, dark, and surreal … Unspeakable Thingslives up to its title. –The Millions(Most Anticipated Books of 2016)
 
“Beautiful language, unusual politeness, and a tendency toward daring literalc.