The Polyglot Lovers

The Polyglot Lovers is a fiercely witty & nuanced contribution to feminism in the #metoo era. Pleasure is an elusive thing, love even more so.

'Do you have to stare like that?' I asked.
'Think about the actors in porn. They've got no problem showing themselves off.'
'Think about when I broke your nose,' I replied.

Ellinor is thirty-six. She wears soft black sweatpants and a Michelin Man jacket. She fights. Smart & unsentimental, she tries her hand at online dating, only to be stranded by a snowstorm with a literary critic.  Cut to Max Lamas, an author who dreams of a polyglot lover, a woman who will understand him - in every tongue. His search takes him to Italy, where he befriends a Marchesa whose old Roman family is on the brink of ruin. At the heart of this literary intrigue is a handwritten manuscript that leaves no one unaffected.

"The novel as a whole is enveloped in a somewhat gothic, sensuous atmosphere, reminiscent of Daphne du Maurier. The Polyglot Lovers is a quiet rapture – unsparing, startling, mesmeric, & told with the soberest of grins." — Yelena Moskovich, The Times Literary Supplement

Ferocious & irreverent, this multiple prize-winning novel burns down the pretensions of a pompous literary establishment & takes no prisoners. First published as De polyglotta älskarna in 2016 by Albert Bonniers Förlag, Stockholm

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SASKIA VOGEL was born & raised in Los Angeles & now lives in its sister city, Berlin, where she works as a writer & Swedish-to-English literary translator. Her translations include work by leading female authors, such as Katrine Marcal, Karolina Ramqvist, Lina Wolff, & the modernist eroticist Rut Hillarp. Her debut novel Permission was published in four languages in 2019.