Blue Hunger

An electrifying descent from loneliness and grief into obsessive, all-consuming love, by an Italian literary star.


When Xu bites Ruben, when she has her in her teeth, naked and bad on top of her, everything is good. In their skyscraper apartment, overlooking Shanghai’s blue-tinged, pulsating nightlife, they swallow the little yellow pills that will make all things dangerous feel safe.

In abandoned factories and dilapidated slaughterhouses, Xu pushes Ruben to extremes of pleasure and pain that she has never experienced before, to a place where language breaks down and passion becomes consumption.

Blue Hunger asks how we create our identities and how we escape them; it is a fever-dream of a novel, propulsive and uncanny, that demolishes all taboos.





‘Viola Di Grado is, most importantly, a powerful and original writer; the fact that she also writes, movingly and with complexity, about members of the LGBT population, renders her work all the more singular.’
-Michael Cunningham, author of The Hours

‘To read Blue Hunger is to enter a dreamlike state, guided by irresistible, evocative writing, immaculate details, and vivid emotions dripping with desire. Viola Di Grado offers us a brilliant, highly immersive story about the need to consume and be consumed, love, messiness, and the power of language. Blue Hunger is a wholly compelling piece of art, and Viola Di Grado is a genius.’
-Jami Attenberg, author of The Middlesteins

‘Di Grado is a real writer, so everything under the spell of her words is vibrant and evocative. Blue Hunger, a prose poem and a fearless descent into language and the realm of meanings, is about our experience in the acidic lights of the contemporary world.’
-FIlippo La Porta, La Repubblica

Format: Paperback
Pages: 224
Imprint: Scribe Australia
Publication date: 28/02/2023