Hannah Versus the Tree - Hardcover

"Betrayal and vengeance have rarely been so elegantly rendered as in this searing novel. [The author] 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

"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

KIRKUS REVIEW An heiress to the ancient money of a storied family seeks revenge for personal and global wrongs in this powerful debut novel. Hannah is the precociously brilliant daughter of the Syrl family. Her rootlet of the family tree--which traces its origins back to Nordic conquest--is led by the somewhat scantily sketched figure of her renegade father, a lesser son who has rejected the lineage of rapacious, colonialist greed that has resulted in his family's stratospheric wealth. Raised under the haphazard supervision of parents embroiled in the dissolutions of their respective marriages, Hannah and her unnamed male best friend (who narrates the book) are largely educated by the Old One and the Wise One. These are two aging grandparents who provide the children with access to the myth structures of the native peoples who once walked the woods that surround them, teach them how to raise wolf pups, train them in Latin, Greek, and Potawatomi (an Algonquin language), and embed within them a deep appreciation for the value of brutality and the civilizations which are born from it. As a teenager, Hannah is brought back into the fold of the Syrl family by the aging matriarch of the clan (sister to the Wise One). When she opposes a scheme presented by the ruthless eldest son of the Syrl tribe, she is punished with a brutal violation of both her body and her trust. This act sets her on a path of epic vengeance--aided and abetted by our impassioned narrator (who is now both friend and lover); Annika, a sexually nihilistic cousin; Justin, a friend with a gift for violence; and a cast of other druggies, skaters, dealers, and hackers who help her take her vengeance to a global scale. The impact of the novel's plot is somewhat hampered by its mode of telling. Our narrator is doubly removed from the action by both time (the events of the book have all happened in the past) and emotional distance (he loves Hannah but he is not Hannah, who is the undisputed main character of the novel). In spite of this, de la Durantaye's (Beckett's Art of Mismaking, 2016, etc.) background as a literary critic and scholar is translated here into a facility with the mutable power of myth that renders his prose at once a dream and a brutal awakening. A novel of stark beauty and even starker consequence whose language makes up for the often opaque action of the plot.--Kirkus "Kirkus "

Hannah is a fiercely intelligent young women, 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 Hannah presents a new literary genre, the mythopoetic thriller.