The Girl at the Door

A tense, provocative and nuanced novel about a rape accusation in an idyllic commune from the author of the 2024 International Booker Prize-longlisted Lost on Me

I was in my sixth month when the girl came knocking.

The girl came empty handed. On the threshold, her hair down, her jeans tight.

'Are you the professor’s wife?' the girl asked me. 'I have to speak to you,' she said.

'The professor raped me,' the girl said.

Reviews

‘An astonishing novel that examines moral anguish from original and captivating angles, full of quotable lines and startling insights into conscience and the urge to judge. The Girl at the Door explores the limits of intimacy, physical and emotional, and is as gripping as anything I’ve read this year. Sexy, dangerous, modern – what’s not to love?’ Richard Beard

‘This uncompromising, fiercely intelligent novel confirms the moral usefulness of serious art: it reminds us that the world is more complicated than our righteous certainties; it forces us to acknowledge the abyss’ Garth Greenwell, author of What Belongs to You

‘Fierce, intelligent, candid, and erotic, Veronica Raimo has written a devastating modern fable of passion, where acts of betrayal, violence, and sex both sustain and destroy the characters’ lives in unexpected and provocative ways’ Lily Tuck

‘The first post-Weinstein novel’ Vanity Fair

‘Elegant, mesmerizing and merciless’ La Repubblica

‘Veronica Raimo’s novel will enrich the debate on the most current contemporary issues and at the same time belongs to the international literary scene that today can talk about
emotions, individuals and sex in the most interesting and stylistically innovative way: from Catherine Lacey to Sally Rooney’ Vice

‘Haunting … a book about harassment, consensus, and vigilantism that has caught the zeitgeist of the times’ Vogue

‘Will be talked about for a long time’ Esquire

About the author

Veronica Raimo is the author of four novels, the most recent of which, Lost On Me was longlisted for the 2024 International Booker Prize, shortlisted for the Premio Strega Prize and won the Strega Off Prize, the Strega Giovani Prize and the Viareggio Rèpaci Prize. She wrote the script for Marco Bellocchio’s Bella addormentata. She has written for a number of Italian publications and contributes regularly to Rolling Stone, and her translations into Italian include works by F Scott Fitzgerald, Octavia E. Butler, Ray Bradbury and Ursula K. Le Guin. She lives in Rome.