Matate, amor

Ariana Harwicz's debut novel follows an unnamed narrator adrift in an isolated house on the edge of a forest in rural France, caught between the demands of a newborn son, a husband who no longer desires her, and a mind coming apart at the seams. Written in a feverish, unbroken stream of consciousness, the book blurs what the narrator is doing from what she is only imagining — stalking the treeline with a knife, watching her neighbor, contemplating her own death — and never lets the reader settle into a stable sense of what is real.

Harwicz wrote the novel in a single burst in 2011 and published it in Argentina in 2012 as Matate, amor, the opening book of an unplanned trilogy about motherhood and unraveling. Its English translation, Die, My Love, was longlisted for the Man Booker International Prize in 2018 and has since been translated into more than a dozen languages; a 2025 film adaptation directed by Lynne Ramsay, starring Jennifer Lawrence and Robert Pattinson, premiered at Cannes.

Critics have likened its density and claustrophobia to Thomas Bernhard, praising a voice that is violent and lyrical by turns — a portrait of postpartum depression and the war between motherhood and selfhood that refuses to look away from either.