Click here to read The New York Times interview with critic John Williams, here to read the BOMB Magazine interview with Alexandra Keleeman, here for The Paris Review interview with Amina Cain, or here for the interview with Shondaland. You can listen to the NPR interview with Marie Louise Kelly's All Things Considered here. For Farsi language press, you can watch the BBC Persian interview here, or read the Farsi language review here. 

It’s summer when Arezu, an Iranian American teenager, goes to Spain to meet her estranged father at an apartment he owns there. He never shows up, instead sending her a weekly allowance, care of his step-nephew, Omar, a forty-year-old Lebanese man. As the weeks progress, Arezu is drawn into a mercurial, charged, and ultimately catastrophic affair with Omar, a relationship that shatters her just at the cusp of adulthood.

Two decades later, Arezu inherits the apartment. She returns with her best friend, Ellie, an Israeli-American scholar devoted to the Palestinian cause, to excavate the place and finally put to words a trauma she’s long held in silence. Together, she and Ellie catalog the questions of agency, sexuality, displacement, and erasure that surface as Arezu confronts the ghosts of that summer, crafting between them a story that spans continents and centuries.

Equal parts Marguerite Duras and Shirley Jackson, Rachel Cusk and Clarice Lispector, Savage Tongues is a compulsive, unsettling, and bravely observed exploration of violence and eroticism, haunting and healing, the profound intimacy born of the deepest pain, and the life-long search for healing. 

Praise for Savage Tongues

Most Anticipated Book of the Year from Lit Hub • See the Lit Hub cover reveal and most anticipated books list.

“Oloomi’s latest novel arrives at a pivotal crossroads in our cultural history, with the #MeToo movement urging a confrontation with buried sexual traumas, inviting us to look back, to dive deeper, to question forgetfulness and comforting memories. Savage Tongues does all of that and more.” —Los Angeles Review of Books

“Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi is master, capable of the most sophisticated swerve into commentary on the nature of time, of political economies, while in the midst of the sweetest litanizing description—shameless and sculptural in its abundant aptitude for saying what's there.” —Eileen Myles, The Women’s Review of Books

"The boldness and bitter confidence of Oloomi’s writing, utterly immersed in language yet grasping something un-languageable, felt like a reminder of how powerful a text can be when it inhabits itself wholly, in all its contradictions and capaciousness." —Alexandra Kleeman, BOMB Magazine

“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

“By turns brilliant, erotic and piercing, this third novel from PEN/Faulkner award-winner Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi shines new light into how historical oppression, both at a personal and societal level, continues to dominate our present-day thinking. Ostensibly a dissection of an exploitative relationship, the novel quickly broadens into a wide-ranging examination—and skewering—of master narratives around race, gender, sexuality and religion which dictate the way we live now...Van der Vliet Oloomi reflects the co-existence of pain and pleasure in lush descriptions of the southern Spanish landscape.” —Asian Review of Books

“Savage Tongues breathes fresh life into ancient wounds, erasures, and annihilations. By mining transgressions — historical, sexual, bodily, and territorial— Van der Vliet Oloomi delivers a courageous book, as searing and terrifying as it is healing.” —Neda Maghbouleh, author of The Limits of Whiteness

“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

“The past bears with it a harrowing capacity to disrupt lives...[Savage Tongues] follows one woman’s reckoning with her own past, and the larger context that suffuses the history she’s tried to leave behind.” —vol. 1 Brooklyn

“In Savage Tongues the immensely gifted Van der Vliet Oloomi describes a woman walking the razor thin line between memory and madness as she tries to rescue her younger self. Happily Arezu does not walk the line alone. This vivid account of the haunting nature of trauma is also a wonderful testimonial to friendship. A resonant and powerful novel.” —Margot Livesey, New York Times-bestselling author of The Flight of Gemma Hardy and The Boy in the Field

“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

“Savage Tongues touches all the bases—identity, sex, power, youth and age, the present and the past—and knocks it out of the park. Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi is our woke Marguerite Duras.”
—Francine Prose, Lovers at the Chameleon Club and Mister Monkey

“Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi is no stranger to accolades...And, boy oh boy, does she deserve every one of them. I will be anticipating anything she writes...Savage Tongues has drawn comparisons to Shirley Jackson and Samanta Schweblin for the way it keeps you suspended in a state of discomfort and hauntingly depicts a shattering of the self.” —Lit Hub

“In Savage Tongues, Van der Vliet Oloomi establishes herself as a skilled cartographer of trauma. With a remarkably clear vision and dynamic, colorful prose, she takes us along on her journey into the deepest recesses of an embattled mind. This is a book for those who expect from the novel far more than a story.” —Amir Ahmadi Arian, author of Then The Fish Swallowed Him

“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

"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

"Compulsive...Van der Vliet Oloomi explores questions surrounding sexuality, agency, and displacement." —AV Club

“This is a wildly philosophical political novel draped on a simple (traumatic) voyage by a young woman returning twenty years later with her best friend to a family-owned apartment in Spain, where she had spent part of the summer before college and where stepmother's favorite nephew basically raped her in a boundaryless way that became the defining sexual experience of her life--an experience that included pleasure and a welter of other accumulated contradictions, or maybe commonplaces in probably more female coming-of-age sagas than we are ever ready to know. Azareen balances an unerring willingness to explore obsession with an uncanny knack for creating layers and layers of gorgeous and simple physical description--of Spanish landscape as well as the flighty abandoned apartment she is briefly trying to inhabit while the memories keep pouring up from a rich and articulate unconscious, which is the true location of this book. Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi is master, capable of the most sophisticated swerve into commentary on the nature of time, of political economies, while in the midst of the sweetest litanizing description--shameless and sculptural in its abundant aptitude for saying what's there.” —Eileen Myles, The Women’s Book Review