The Polyglot Lovers

'Do you have to stare like that?' I asked.
'Think about the actors in porn. They've got no problem showing themselves off.'
'Think about when I broke your nose,' I replied.
Ellinor is thirty-six. She wears soft black sweatpants and a Michelin Man jacket. She fights. Smart and unsentimental, she tries her hand at online dating, only to be stranded by a snowstorm with a literary critic. Cut to Max Lamas, an author who dreams of a polyglot lover, a woman who will understand him-in every tongue. His search takes him to Italy, where he befriends a marchesa whose old Roman family is on the brink of ruin. At the heart of this literary intrigue is a handwritten manuscript that leaves no one unaffected.
The Polyglot Lovers is a fiercely witty and nuanced contribution to feminism in the #metoo era. Pleasure is an elusive thing, love even more so.

Lina Wolff's debut novel, Bret Easton Ellis and the Other Dogs, published by And Other Stories in 2016, was awarded the Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize, Sweden's Vi Magazine Literature Prize, and was shortlisted for the 2013 Swedish Radio Award for Best Novel of the Year. Her second novel, The Polyglot Lovers, won Sweden's biggest domestic literary prize, the August Prize, as well as the Svenska Dagbladet Prize, and has been translated into seventeen languages. A collection of short stories is forthcoming from And Other Stories in 2020.