Most Anticipated Book of the Summer from Vulture, Refinery29, Lit Hub, and Hey Alma Most Anticipated Book of the Year from Harper's Bazaar, Lit Hub, and The Millions Most Anticipated Book of August from The A.V. Club, Bustle, vol. 1 Brooklyn, and Lambda Literary "A love story of the most fevered, brutal order...The prose is propulsive, erotic, and darkly dreamlike, recalling the early novels of Marguerite Duras...[SAVAGE TONGUES] interrogates the narratives we assign to the past and asks what we are allowed to expect of those who love us." —Vulture "Not many writers can convey both great beauty and horror at the same time, but in Savage Tongues, Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi does so deftly...Oloomi works through questions of sex, friendship, trauma, and the obliteration of the self, with an inventive approach to time, setting, and character...Oloomi’s sentences, whether evoking pain or pleasure, are electric, filled with life. If I’m honest, when I was reading, I often wished I had written them. The imagery is filmic, and sometimes piercing." —Amina Cain, The Paris Review "A novel of ideas...Though steeped in sex and haunted by fleshy frights...their exorcism is mostly a matter of language." —Washington Post "Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi's stunning new novel is a hauntingly beautiful depiction of the way past traumas grip at our insides, threatening to tear us apart years after we've experienced them...Savage Tongues is rigorous in its exploration of the effects that violence and corruption have on our conception of ourselves." —Refinery29 "This is a pulls-no-punches look at abandonment, ownership, trauma, and the convergence of political and personal pain. It is also a touching ode to friendship, a partial salve for these wounds." —Lit Hub "Written with the intensity of early Duras and Ferrante’s Days of Abandonment...With the help of a dear friend, Arezu excavates and puts words to her past trauma in this novel about love, friendship, identity, and displacement." —The Millions “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