Leland de la Durantaye and Lydia Kiesling

Leland de la Durantaye discusses his new novel, Hannah Versus the Tree with Lydia Kiesling.

Praise for Hannah Versus the Tree 

“An heiress to the ancient money of a storied family seeks revenge for personal and global wrongs in this powerful debut novel of […] stark beauty and even starker consequence.” —Kirkus

“Hannah Versus The Tree is unlike anything I have ever read—thriller, myth, dream, and poem combined. It tells the story of a terrible act of violence and a terrible act of revenge, but in ways that hardly resemble contemporary fiction. Sometimes I thought I was reading the Chorus’s part from a lost Greek tragedy, or perhaps an impossibly updated Beowulf. Written in an immaculate, lyrically charged, uncannily autonomous prose, this lovely novel is at once a modern story about money and politics and sexual violence, and an ancient fable of grievance and justice.” —James Wood

“Betrayal and vengeance have rarely been so elegantly rendered as in this searing novel. It invokes Roman history and mythology to accompany an aristocratic, brutalized girl who is sacrificed by the family matriarch in a fatal flaw of judgment. The beautiful prose exposes and illumines the cost of underestimating an extraordinary girl.” —Amy Hempel

About Hannah Versus the Tree

Hannah is a fiercely intelligent young woman, daughter of a powerful family’s black sheep son, and raised to question who has been, is, and will be damaged by business deals meant to protect and maintain the dynasty. A devastating wrong is done to her when she opposes a family scheme and her response is a battle cry of astounding violence and beauty. As haunting as Shelly Jackson or Thomas Bernhard, as enthralling as Nabokov or Joyce, Leland de la Durantaye’s debut novel is a radical departure from contemporary storytelling. At once the story of a terrific act of vengeance and of a lifelong love, Hannah versus the Tree presents a new literary genre, the mythopoetic thriller.