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Lapvona: A Novel

Ottessa Moshfegh

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An Instant New York Times Bestseller!

“ _Lapvona_ flips all the conventions of familial and parental relations, putting hatred where love should be or a negotiation where grief should be . . . Through a mix of witchery, deception, murder, abuse, grand delusion, ludicrous conversations, and cringeworthy moments of bodily disgust, Moshfegh creates a world that you definitely don’t want to live in, but from which you can’t look away.” —The Atlantic

In a village buffeted by natural disasters, a motherless shepherd boy finds himself part of a power struggle that puts the community’s faith to a savage test, in a spellbinding novel that represents Ottessa Moshfegh’s most exciting leap yet.

Little Marek, the abused and delusional son of the village shepherd, believes his mother died giving birth to him. One of Marek’s few consola­tions is his enduring bond with the blind village midwife, Ina, who suckled him when he was a baby. For some people, Ina’s ability to receive trans­missions of sacred knowledge from the natural world is a godsend. For others, Ina’s home in the woods is a godless place.

The people’s desperate need to believe that there are powers that be who have their best interests at heart is put to a cruel test by their depraved lord and governor, especially in this year of record drought and famine. But when fate brings Marek into violent proximity to the lord’s family, new and occult forces arise to upset the old order. By year’s end, the veil between blindness and sight, life and death, and the natural world and the spirit world will prove to be very thin indeed.

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Posts about this title from Bookwyrm Ink

[Bookwyrm Ink\\
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Bookwyrm Ink\\
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• Oct 2 2025](https://azthiabookwyrm.binderybooks.com/)

[71 Books I totally recommend. 📚In song!](https://azthiabookwyrm.binderybooks.com/item/cFFBpRuzVGt7K7eg3sTJ/)

71 Books I totally recommend. 📚In song!

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68 books

3

Posts about this book from across Bindery

[Bookwyrm Ink\\
\\
Bookwyrm Ink\\
\\
• Oct 2 2025](https://azthiabookwyrm.binderybooks.com/)

[71 Books I totally recommend. 📚In song!](https://azthiabookwyrm.binderybooks.com/item/cFFBpRuzVGt7K7eg3sTJ/)

71 Books I totally recommend. 📚In song!

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68 books

3

[Sunny's Book Truck\\
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CJ\\
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• Aug 15 2025](https://sunnysbooktruck.binderybooks.com/)

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[Poll:\\
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Are any of these on your TBR?\\
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Hi nerds,\\
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Last night we held our second installment of the Sunny's Salon—a monthly addition to our event programming that is like a book club with no assigned reading. We kicked off the night by doing a 15 minute reading sprint with some lofi music playing in the background and then went into a larger discussion centered around or Last, Now, and Next. It was so fun hearing about what people were reading or had on their radar (weirdly three people wanted to read Lapvona by Ottessa Moshfegh next) and seeing where reading taste overlapped and differed. Below you will find 50 (!) book recommendations gathered from the Yuma community.\\
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- **_Endling_:** Set in Ukraine, an eccentric scientist breeding rare snails crosses paths with sisters posing as members of the marriage industry to find their activist mother. As Russia invades, they embark on a wild journey with kidnapped bachelors and a last-of-its-kind snail. This darkly comic novel explores survival, love, and hope in times of encroaching darkness.\\
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- **_Hot Girls with Balls_:** In this outrageous and deeply serious satire, two star indoor volleyball players juggle unspoken jealousies in their off-court romance ahead of their rival teams’ first rematch in a year.\\
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- **_Mayra:_** An eerie, hypnotic debut about friendship, desire, and memory set against the sultry backdrop of Florida’s swamplands.\\
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- **_Empire of Pain_:** A grand, devastating portrait of three generations of the Sackler family, famed for their philanthropy, whose fortune was built by Valium and whose reputation was destroyed by OxyContin.\\
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- **_Say Hello to my Little Friend:_** _Scarface_ meets _Moby Dick_ in _Say Hello to My Little Friend_ following a young man’s attempt to capitalize on his mother’s murky legacy—a story steeped in Miami’s marvelous and sinister magic.\\
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- **_I'll Make a Spectacle of You:_** This heart-pounding horror debut from Beatrice Winifred Iker takes listeners to Bricksbury University, the oldest and most storied HBCUs in the nation. But as one student is about to find out, a long history comes with a legacy of secrets.\\
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- **_Before Elvis:_** In this thought-provoking book, the Black musicians who influenced Elvis Presley's music finally receive recognition and praise.\\
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- **_Nineteen Minutes:_** Jodi Picoult pens her most riveting book yet, with a startling and poignant story about the devastating aftermath of a small-town tragedy.\\
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- **_Pageboy_:** With this evocative and lyrical debut, Oscar-nominated star Elliot Page captures the universal human experience of searching for ourselves and our place in this complicated world.\\
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- **_Follow My Voice:_** This spellbinding #BookTok sensation from internationally bestselling author Ariana Godoy follows a nineteen-year-old battling agoraphobia as she forms an unexpected connection with the host of her favorite college radio show.\\
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- **_Wild Love_:** She's been driving him wild for years. The good kind of wild. The bad kind of wild. But mostly, the kind of wild that comes with wanting your best friend's little sister and knowing you can't have her.\\
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- **_The Possession of Alba Díaz:_** When a demonic presence awakens deep in a Mexican silver mine, the young woman it seizes must turn to the one man she shouldn’t trust…from bestselling author Isabel Cañas.\\
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- **_The Colossus of New York_:** Here is a literary love song that will entrance anyone who has lived in—or spent time—in the greatest of American cities.\\
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- **_Is Mother Dead_:** A cat and mouse game of surveillance and psychological torment develops between a middleaged artist and her aging mother.\\
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- **_The Metamorphosis:_** This is not just a novel about physical transformation but also a deep reflection on alienation and loneliness.\\
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- **_Time and Time Again:_** In this debut YA speculative romance perfect for fans of Rachael Lippincott, two queer, disabled, Jewish teens find themselves stuck in a time loop--and falling love.\\
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- **_The Fellowship of the Ring:_** One Ring to rule them all, One Ring to find them, One Ring to bring them all and in the darkness bind them.\\
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- **_The Library at Hellebore:_** A deeply dark academia novel from _USA Today_ bestselling author Cassandra Khaw, perfect for fans of _A Deadly Education_ and _An Education in Malice_ who are hungry for something more diabolical.\\
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- **_A Resistance of Witches:_** As World War II rages around her, a witch abandoned by her coven must journey to find a book of unspeakable power before it lands in Nazi hands.\\
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- **_Ruthless Vows:_** The epic conclusion to the intensely romantic and beautifully written story that started in _Divine Rivals_.\\
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- **_Tender is the Flesh:_** Working at the local processing plant, Marcos is in the business of slaughtering humans - though no one calls them that anymore.\\
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- **_Our Share of Night:_** A woman’s mysterious death puts her husband and son on a collision course with her demonic family.\\
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- **_Heart of Darkness:_** The story is narrated by Charles Marlow, recalling his obsessive quest to locate the ivory trader Kurtz, who has become ensconced deep in the jungle managing a remote outpost. As he ventures further and further down the Congo, Marlow finds himself and his surroundings become increasingly untethered.\\
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- **_Ask Not: The Kennedys and the Women They Destroyed:_** A "harrowing, incendiary" exposé of the real Kennedy Curse—the family’s generations-long legacy of misogyny, murder, and mayhem.\\
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- **_The Summer I Turned Pretty:_** As the summer seasons pass, Belly has to choose between two brothers who love her…and she’ll have to break one of their hearts.\\
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- **_Releasing 10:_** A devastatingly raw, achingly beautiful love story that will rip your heart out and patch it back together.\\
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- **_Tropic of Orange:_** Irreverently juggling magical realism, film noir, hip hop, and chicanismo, _Tropic of Orange_ takes place in a Los Angeles where the homeless, gangsters, infant organ entrepreneurs, and Hollywood collide on a stretch of the Harbor Freeway.\\
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- **_Atmosphere:_** An epic new novel set against the backdrop of the 1980s space shuttle program about the extraordinary lengths we go to live and love beyond our limits.\\
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- **_Starving Saints:_** A transfixing fever dream of medieval horror following three women in a besieged castle that descends ravenously into madness under the spell of mysterious, godlike visitors.\\
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- **_Black Salt Queen:_** Filled with passion, romance, betrayal, and divine magic, _Black Salt Queen_ journeys to a gorgeous precolonial island nation where women—and secrets—reign.\\
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- **_American Scare:_** A vital exposé for both our history and our present day, _American Scare_ tells the riveting story of how the Florida government destroyed the lives of Black and queer citizens in the twentieth century.\\
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- **_Can't Get Enough:_** Hendrix Barry lives a fabulous life. She has phenomenal friends, a loving family, and a thriving business that places her in the entertainment industry's rarefied air. Your vision board? She’s probably living it.\\
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- **_Ship Fever:_** The elegant short fictions gathered hereabout the love of science and the science of love are often set against the backdrop of the nineteenth century.\\
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- **_Lapvona:_** In a village buffeted by natural disasters, a motherless shepherd boy finds himself part of a power struggle that puts the community’s faith to a savage test.\\
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- **_Smothermoss:_** A haunting, imaginative, and twisting tale of two sisters and the menacing, unexplained forces that threaten them and their rural mountain community.\\
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- **_Everything is Tuberculosis:_** A deeply human story illuminating the fight against the world’s deadliest infectious disease.\\
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- **_City of Quartz:_** In _City of Quartz_, Davis reconstructs L.A.’s shadow history and dissects its ethereal economy.\\
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- **_The Coin:_** A bold and unabashed novel about a young Palestinian woman's unraveling as she teaches at a New York City middle school, gets caught up in a scheme reselling Birkin bags, and strives to gain control over her body and mind.\\
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- **_How to Read a Book:_** A heartfelt, uplifting novel about a chance encounter at a bookstore, exploring redemption, unlikely friendships, and the life-changing power of sharing stories.\\
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- **_Razorblade Tears:_** A Black father. A white father. Two murdered sons. A quest for vengeance.\\
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- **_All the Dangerous Things:_** A totally gripping thriller about a desperate mother with a troubled past.\\
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- **_Lock Every Door:_** A young woman whose new job apartment sitting in one of New York’s oldest and most glamorous buildings may cost more than it pays.\\
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- **_Compound Fracture:_** A queer Appalachian thriller that pulls no punches—following a trans autistic teen who's drawn into the generational struggle between the rural poor and those who exploit them.\\
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- **_This is Me Trying:_** Inevitably drawn back together by circumstance and history, Beatriz and Santiago navigate grief, love, mental illness, forgiveness, and what it means to try to build a future after unfathomable loss.\\
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- **_You Weren't Meant to be Human:_** _Alien_ meets _Midsommar_ in this chilling debut adult novel from award-winning author Andrew Joseph White about identity, survival, and transformation amidst an alien invasion in rural West Virginia.\\
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- **_Bright Young Women:_** Don’t miss this “breakneck thriller” that examines “our culture’s obsession with serial killers and true crime” ( _Harper’s Bazaar_) as it follows two women on the pursuit of justice against all odds.\\
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- **_The Changeling:_** With a new introduction by Karen Russell, the 40th anniversary edition of _The Changeling_ is a visionary fairy tale and a work of mythic genius by one of our best writers.\\
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- **_Choke:_** Victor Mancini, a medical-school dropout, is an antihero for our deranged times.](https://sunnysbooktruck.binderybooks.com/item/P7WfIPf3S2q1NS4tNJ2v/)

[What Sunny's Customers Are Reading](https://sunnysbooktruck.binderybooks.com/item/P7WfIPf3S2q1NS4tNJ2v/)

What we're reading in Yuma

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12 books

5
