Quake

by Kitty Mrosovsky, Maggie Gee (Foreword)

The lush story of one woman’s erotic odyssey, by a writer of “extraordinary” talent (Maureen Freely, The Observer).


Olivia offers herself to her younger lover Rosairo completely, but he keeps her at a distance, maintaining his relationship with Jess; a university student with whom Olivia grows privately obsessed. When Rosario disappears without explanation, Olivia cracks open the hermetically sealed world of their trysts, abandons her life in London, and pursues him to Italy, travelling south until she reaches Sicily. Here, beneath the sizzling, dangerous sensuality of Mount Etna herself—“like a lady lying on her back exhaling smoke, her long neck voluptuously bare, her hair rippling down where the mountainside is scored in pale streaks, her head thrown back”—Olivia’s quest leads to the ruins of Rosario’s childhood village, destroyed in the earthquake of 1968.


Unpublished during its author’s lifetime, this trailblazinging sensual portrait of female desire is the most powerful thing Kitty Mrosovsky wrote. It was also the last; composed in the late 1980s and early ’90s, after she was diagnosed with the HIV infection that led to her death. “Witty, illuminating and replete with life, an extraordinary one-off performance to savor before the theatre went dark,” writes Maggie Gee in her foreword, Quake is “one of the few works of art that perfectly capture the bliss and tragedy of those phosphorescent years.”

Genres: Fiction, Classics

288 pages, Paperback

Published June 30, 2026

Reviews

[Sophia Eck · Rating 4 out of 5]

Quake by Kitty Mrosovsky is the personal journey of a woman in mourning over all that she almost but truly never had, and that dives deeply into her own speculation upon the circumstances keeping her from what she so badly wants. It begins with her own written speculative snippet of a story, comprised of anecdotal supplication upon the unseen acquaintances of her lover, Rosario, and of how she imagines his life when he is not with her; You start the story with these imagined characters, briefly and shallowly, knowing not much less about them than our protagonist, Olivia, knows herself. You slowly gain context throughout the novel, putting anecdotes to names, circumstances to relationships, alongside Olivia and her melancholic yearning and her searches for whatever scraps of history she can manage to unearth about her elusive younger lover. Their relationship is often mirrored in Olivia’s attachment to her neighbors cat, Saffron, and how deeply she in both situations tries to keep what was never really hers in the first place. The crux of the novel is essentially the incredibly human lesson of how to live with the constant grief as a result of always desperately craving that which eludes or escapes you. The novel is deeply introspective, beautifully and carefully written, and I feel will be heavily enjoyed by those who often read Ernaux or Nin — fans of the literary exploration of the lone but eroticized woman and her emotionally reserved but internally honest condition. Comes out on June 9th, 2026.

[Dol Leander · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a novel one reads understanding a world that did not exist at the time it was written, challenging the norms of then and even those of now. We follow our tragicomic protagonist, and by extension those she has fixated on, through an erotic odyssey of sorts. The characters are uninhibited by shame or fear of their own sexuality in a way that is freeing even as a reader. And yet, there is still grief present throughout. Sex is not just a simple pleasure here, instead it exists as a need equal to water and one that will never be fully satisfied. The text becomes dense with this painful yearning and melancholic metaphors. This is emphasized even more by the knowledge we hold outside of this fiction, that the author of this sensual masterpiece would later die of HIV-related complications. Introspective in its intensity, this exploration of desire is unshackled from societal expectation and impossible to look away from.

[Grace · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5/5 see another status update for the review- but I just don’t like men enough for this book I think