A woman arrives in Florence, overwhelmed by the strange, warm city so different from her home. Amidst the Renaissance architecture and amorous couples, she finds an unexpected love of her own. With his dark, ugly looks, people might stop and stare, wondering what someone like her was doing with someone like him. But he’s the Mickey to her Minnie, and she can fix him—they can fix each other. She feels bound to him, body and soul.
It’s not long before the lying starts. Other women have begun to notice him, and she spirals into paranoia. Soon they’re both cheating and lashing out, and she becomes more and more convinced he’s not merely a violent man: there’s a demon inside him, and inside her too. Their grip on each other is so strong, it might be impossible to break, even after she puts an ocean between them, following another man to New Orleans.
Heady, unsettling, and shockingly funny with its dead-on descriptions of codependent and abusive relationships, The Devil’s Grip takes us on a breathless journey with the shadow selves we can’t escape.
Author
Lina Wolff
Lina Wolff was born in Lund, Sweden, and lived for several years in Spain and Italy, where she worked as a translator. She arrived on the literary stage in 2009 with the publication of Many People Die Like You, a collection of short stories set in Spain and in the south of Sweden. In 2012 her debut novel, Bret Easton Ellis and the Other Dogs, won the Vi Magazine Literature Prize. Her second novel, The Polyglot Lovers, won Sweden’s highest literary award, the August Prize for Fiction, in 2016, and has been translated into seventeen languages. Carnality (Other Press, 2022) was awarded the prestigious Aftonbladet Literature Prize in 2019, and The Corpses We Planted won the August Prize for Fiction in 2025.
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