Thank you Net Galley. A fascinating read by Ms Moshfegh. I had read a number of her stories and am halfway through listening to one of her books. I like her style and enjoyed this book very much. An easy and interesting read.

An eery book about an elderly woman, Vesta, who has moved to a remote cabin after the death of her husband, who finds a note about someone called Magda who has been killed. Vesta becomes consumed by the narrative she constructs around this note, and the line between fantasy and reality becomes more and more blurred as the novel goes on and the reader learns more about Vesta, her husband and her dog Charlie. I raced through the second half of the book as the tension reaches a crescendo and my fear for Vesta and particularly Charlie increased, but I found the ending was as shrouded in ambiguity as the rest of the novel.

A decent story but I felt it dragged a little and I had to force myself to finish. Not for me sorry x

Unfortunately, the concept was more interesting than the book itself, which means that the execution let me down, a lot; I have no problem with meandering plot narratives, and, though Moshfegh writes beautifully, "Death in her hands" felt average, at best.

I think this is going to be a very polarizing book which will evoke strong reactions. I didn't enjoy this book. The idea behind it was solid and i was keen to dive into it but i was very disappointed. This just didn't deliver and i can understand why people are so let down after the authors brilliant last book.

This book is one of a kind - the internal monologue of an increasingly frail woman, (mentally and physically) with a macabre, dark imagination. In a way it was desperately sad to be so involved in her confusion and decline, but it had some wonderfully humorous moments, and her one and only relationship (that with her beloved dog) was sensitively conveyed. The ending was a shock and left some questions unanswered, but the writing here is brilliantly imaginative and although Vesta, the protagonist, is not a particularly likeable character, I found her convoluted and bizarre internal world utterly compelling.

This was a great follow up by the author of My Year of Rest and Relaxation. The tone of the writing is somewhat similar and it had a similar energy to it that meant as a reader we got to experience the slow rollout of the action. This may not be the longest book but it explores some really interesting ideas. Moshfegh makes the world come alive with the writing and I was hooked from the first page until the end. The idea of who the body is was explored well and this is one of the best elements of this.

Listen, I love Ottessa Moshfegh. LOVE her. Love her terrible, brilliant fucked up characters but this wasn't what I wanted. It's one of those books you have to give in to to get through it. It's meta, it's weird, there's a dog that plays a central role in the story (so no surprises what happens to the dog), it unravels unbearably slowly and then quickly and then all at once. I'm kinda mad at this book because it felt like a test for the reader and I don't want to be tested, or at least not like this.

I am never sure what to think of Ottessa Moshfegh's novels - some I definitely loved (Eileen), some I am not 100% sure of (My Year of Rest and Relaxation) but afterwards I tell myself it was brilliant and that I couldn't have any doubt. I think Death in Her Hands falls into that category. I quite liked the beginning - old lady, maybe slightly less unlikeable than Ottessa Moshfegh's other characters at the start, starting a new life in a cabin in the woods with her dog, living what would essentially be my dream life. Of course it starts getting darker by the page when she finds a note about Magda and a dead body but no dead body. I kept wondering where it would go, and somehow it didn't go where I thought it would, and it stayed quite... muddled. The end left me wanting more. I am sure it is a very clever novel, full of references, and I didn't expect the ending to tell me everything, but I expected something different.

Overall it was interesting and well-written and I feel I should like it more than I did. Maybe it just felt too much like Otessa Moshfegh was trying very hard to write a Moshfegh book.

Ottessa Moshfegh is one of those writers I will follow to the end of the earth. I especially loved My Year of Rest and Relaxation and her collection of short stories, Homesick for Another World. Death in Her Hands - which follows the isolated 72 year old widow Vesta and her burgeoning obsession with solving a murder mystery that may or may not be all in her imagination - isn’t quite at the dizzy heights of that level, but it’s close. It’ll still be one of the most interesting things you read this year.

Vesta is the ultimate unreliable narrator and you often get the sense that Moshfegh herself is trolling the reader. Vesta hates the mystery genre and abhors books that move along slowly with no discernible plot...

The reader becomes so invested in Vesta’s increasingly convoluted narrative involving the possible murder victim, Magda, that they begin to inhabit the world she has constructed for Magda and her band of suspects. Gradually, though, the cracks appear and we realise that, of course, nothing is as it seems.

A quick read, but one well worth your time.

I had two good goes at this book, but I gave up in the end. I’m very disappointed because I loved My Year Of Rest And Relaxation, but I simply couldn’t get on with Death In Her Hands.

The book is the internal monologue of a widowed and isolated woman whose life seeking solitude and calm is disrupted by finding a disturbing note while walking in the woods. It’s an intriguing beginning...which goes nowhere extremely slowly. I just couldn’t keep going with the endless minutiae of Vesta’s thought processes and what was intended to be an intimate psychological study was, to me, tedious, stodgy and uninteresting.

Otessa Moshfegh is a fine writer, but this one did nothing for me whatsoever, I’m afraid.

(My thanks to Jonathan Cape for an ARC via NetGalley.)

A clever and knowing book that subverts expectations. Death in her Hands has a wry and caustic humour that fans of Muriel Spark will enjoy.

slippery, hard to grasp presentation of a character drama in a lot of ways. It is, for all that, strangely compelling and not a little addictive, I read it in one sitting, it is short and easily flowing.

The ending let it down for me really - there's a shockingly horrific moment that quietly comes out of nowhere- and I'm not really sure what the point of that was. I had a momentary disappointment that after all of the rest the author went for shock value when to get to where the character needed to be there was no need for it. A shame because otherwise this would have been an easy 5* for me given the obvious talent behind the scenes.

I'd still recommend it but be ready for a little upset at the end.

So, what's with the synchronicities between this and Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead? Both feature a reclusive old woman living in the woods; give prime significance to a dog; riff on the murder mystery genre; use Blake (albeit in different ways); and tackle the oppressions of living under a patriarchy. The more overt engagement with the Catholic church in Drive manifests as teasing hints in Death: Magda, Ghod, Vesta (vestments?), the town where she lives, Bethsmane, a kind of linguistic mash-up of Bethlehem and Gethsemane... One big difference, though, is that while I didn't get on *at all* with Drive Your Plow, I *loved* this!

Moshfegh continues to awe with her originality, her cool and controlled writing, her sheer interestingness (and if that's not a word, it ought to be!). Here, she's attentive to reading, having Vesta parse a brief note to infinity and offering up a model of how to read from all angles. She also delivers a sly masterclass in how to create characters as we watch Vesta - a rich character in her own right - 'create' Magda from nothing.

At the same time, Vesta's own life and personality seep out from behind the smokescreen of plot. In another story, Vesta could have been just one of those women who represent a generation who must have been born in the 1950s: in Moshfegh's hands, she's also an individual, unique, whose voice may have been muted all her life but who steps alive, now, off the page... even as the text itself reminds us that she's a creature of the writer's imagination. Did I say this is seductively meta?

This is less obviously grimy than Eileen, with more ostensible plot than My Year of Rest and Relaxation. There are flashes of Moshfegh's subversive humour (on the now empty urn that held her husband's ashes: 'What would I fill it back up with? Dirt from the garden? Plant a tulip bulb?') and the sheer intelligence, both literary and emotional, shines through. Marvellous, undoubtedly set to be one of my reads of the year - and my book-crush on Moshfegh continues!

I’ll start with the things I absolutely hated about this novel:
1. The ending. I won’t spoil it but it is horrifying.
2. The fatphobia. I initially tried to convince myself that it was just the character, and that Moshfegh was using it to give the protagonist Vesta some flaws but no. The vitriol and frequency, for no real reason of plot, must surely mean that Ottessa Moshfegh hates fat people.
But somehow I still liked Death in Her Hands. Moshfegh just draws you in so you have to keep reading. This murder mystery, of sorts, dedicates quite a lot of time to ruminating on the process of writing, and even begins to have Vesta write her own story, and I would have loved if the whole novel continued in that vein. Vesta is also just the perfect unreliable narrator: an elderly woman living alone in the middle of nowhere with a very active imagination.

Thank you to Netgalley and the publishers for a copy of this novel.

Ottessa Moshfegh novels all seems quite different to each other and this is no exception. While I enjoy Moshfegh’s writing style and flew through this book, overall I neither hated it or loved it.

The novel consists of a rambling stream of consciousness of the unreliable protagonist and her wild imagination.
I have to admit that I was sort of waiting for this to stop and something more concrete to emerge which it didn’t quite.