3.0 

Tender

By Ariana Harwicz & Carolina Orloff &
Tender by Ariana Harwicz & Carolina Orloff &  digital book - Fable

Publisher Description

A mother and son inhabit an isolated and increasingly dangerous private world.

The third and final installment of Ariana Harwicz's "Involuntary Trilogy" finds us on familiar, disquieting ground. Under the spell of a mother’s madness, the French countryside transforms into a dreamscape of interconnected imagery: animals, desire, the functions of the body. Most troublingly: the comfort of a teenage son. Scorning the bourgeois mores and conventionality of their small town, she withdraws him from school and the two embark on ever more antisocial and dangerous behavior.  Harwicz is at her best here, building an interior world so robust, and so grotesque, that it eclipses our shared reality. Savage, and savagely funny, she leaves us singed, if not scorched.

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Tender Reviews

3.0
“I fully support women writing strange, transgressive, unhinged books. I just don’t think this does enough with its extremity to justify it. The novel is one long, disjointed block of text, with POVs sliding between mother and son and scenes bleeding into each other. I understand the intention, but instead of feeling productively destabilising, I mostly felt confused and exhausted. The constant shock, animalistic behaviour, incest-adjacent imagery, sudden violence, starts to feel repetitive rather than revealing. There are glimpses of a story here: poverty, institutions circling, real social pressure. There are even a few genuinely beautiful lines. But the book never stays grounded long enough for those elements to mean much. Much of it feels like a repetition of ideas Harwicz has explored more sharply elsewhere. I don’t think it’s a bad book. I just think it mistakes going further for going deeper.”

About Ariana Harwicz

Ariana Harwicz is one of the most radical figures in contemporary Argentinian literature. Her prose is characterised by its violence, eroticism, irony and criticism of the clichés surrounding notions of the family and conventional relationships. Born in Buenos Aires in 1977, Harwicz studied screenwriting and drama in Argentina, and earned a degree in Performing Arts from the University of Paris VII as well as a Masters in comparative literature from the Sorbonne. She has taught screenwriting and written plays. Her ‘involuntary’ trilogy of books published by Charco Press comprises Die, My Love (2017), Feebleminded (2019) and Tender (2021). Die, My Love was longlisted for the Man Booker International Prize (2018) and shortlisted for the Republic of Consciousness Prize (2018), and has been translated into more than ten languages. In 2025 Die My Love is being released as a major feature film directed by Lynne Ramsay and starring Jennifer Lawrence and Robert Pattinson.

Carolina Orloff

Originally from Buenos Aires and now based in Edinburgh, Carolina Orloff is an experienced translator and researcher in Latin American literature. In 2016, Carolina co-founded Charco Press, where she acts as Publishing Director and Chief Editor. She is also the co-translator of Ariana Harwicz’s novels Die, My Love , Feebleminded and Tender , and of Jorge Consiglio’s Fate .

Annie McDermott

Annie McDermott is the translator of a dozen books from Spanish and Portuguese, by such writers as Mario Levrero, Ariana Harwicz, Brenda Lozano, Fernanda Trías and Lídia Jorge. She was awarded the Premio Valle-Inclán for her translation of Wars of the Interior by Joseph Zárate, and her translation of Brickmakers by Selva Almada was shortlisted for the Warwick Prize for Women in Translation. In 2024 her translation of Selva Almada's novel Not a River was shortlisted for the International Booker Prize. She has previously lived in Mexico City and São Paulo, and is now based in Hastings in the UK.

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