"Oloomi’s novel examines trauma in a multifaceted way...facing the challenges of sustaining an identity in countries with blurred borders and marginalized peoples, where vestiges of the lost past remain embedded in the landscape." — Los Angeles Review of Books
"A love story of the most fevered, brutal order...Propulsive, erotic, and darkly dreamlike." —Vulture
A new novel by PEN/Faulkner Award winner Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi, "written with the intensity of early Marguerite Duras and Ferrante's Days of Abandonment," about a young woman’s search for healing in the fall-out of an affair with a much older man, a personal and political exploration of desire, power, domination, and human connection (The Millions).
Written with the intensity of early Marguerite Duras and Ferrante's Days of Abandonment, Savage Tongues is an autobiographical novel that weaves personal and political history, exploring questions of violence, post-colonial identity, and inter-faith friendship.
At seventeen, Arezu, an Iranian American teenager, travels to Andalusia in southern Spain—a historically Islamic and Sephardic space—to reconnect with her estranged father. Instead, she is left in the care of Omar, a forty-year-old Lebanese man, and drawn into a charged and catastrophic relationship that shatters her just at the cusp of adulthood.
Two decades later, Arezu inherits the same apartment where her life was irrevocably altered. She returns with her best friend, Ellie, a Jewish scholar devoted to the Palestinian cause, to excavate the place together. As the two push through visions of the brutal past and symbols of future cruelty, asking what it means to find agency in the face of violence, the lush landscapes of Andalucia and Israel/Palestine echo each other like ghostly apparitions, haunting one another across time and memory.
Equal parts Shirley Jackson, Rachel Cusk, and Clarice Lispector, Savage Tongues re-writes the narratives we assign to love, power, and memory, the profound intimacy born of the deepest pain, and the life-long search for healing.
Most Anticipated Book of the Year from Literary Hub “A luxuriant fevered quest for reclamation,
Savage Tongues is political, poetical, and spooky good.”
—Joy Williams “Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi’s
Savage Tongues is an international novel careful to record the beauty of the natural world while also chronicling the harm people do to one another in this world. Van der Vliet Oloomi wants to know what we can expect of our families—our fathers, our lovers—when we are the same people who will wage war and destroy our planet in order to do so. This book is relentless in the best way.”
—Jericho Brown, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Tradition “Against the gorgeous, punishing landscapes of Andalusia, the narrator of
Savage Tongues relentlessly and movingly anatomizes the links between violence—both personal and systemic—and desire. This uncompromising novel lives at the border of memory and dream, restlessly seeking a logic that can transform cruelty into love.”
—Garth Greenwell, author of Cleanness and What Belongs to You “In
Savage Tongues the immensely gifted Van der Vliet Oloomi describes a woman walking the razor-thin line between memory and madness as she tries to rescue her younger self. Happily Arezu does not walk the line alone. This vivid account of the haunting nature of trauma is also a wonderful testimonial to friendship. A resonant and powerful novel.”
—Margot Livesey, New York Times best-selling author of The Flight of Gemma Hardy and The Boy in the Field “
Savage Tongues touches all the bases—identity, sex, power, youth and age, the present and the past—and knocks it out of the park. Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi is our woke Marguerite Duras.”
—Francine Prose, author of Lovers at the Chameleon Club and Mister Monkey “Azareen Van Der Vliet Oloomi is no stranger to accolades . . . and, boy oh boy, does she deserve every one of them. I will be anticipating anything she writes . . .
Savage Tongues has drawn comparisons to Shirley Jackson and Samanta Schweblin for the way it keeps you suspended in a state of discomfort and hauntingly depicts a shattering of the self.”
—Literary Hub “In
Savage Tongues, Van der Vliet Oloomi establishes herself as a skilled cartographer of trauma. With a remarkably clear vision and dynamic, colorful prose, she takes us along on her journey into the deepest recesses of an embattled mind. This is a book for those who expect from the novel far more than a story.”
—Amir Ahmadi Arian, author of Then the Fish Swallowed Him“Savage Tongues breathes fresh life into ancient wounds, erasures, and annihilations. By mining transgressions—historical, sexual, bodily, and territorial—Van der Vliet Oloomi delivers a courageous book, as searing and terrifying as it is healing.”
—Neda Maghbouleh, author of The Limits of Whiteness 
