Unfit - Ariana Harwicz

Written by Ariana Harwicz
Read by Amy Gorelow
Format: M4B
Bitrate: 128 Kbps
Unabridged

Lisa has lost custody of her young twin boys. Caught between the French legal system’s sluggish bureaucracy and her sinister, scheming in-laws, she’s alone and lost, an Argentine migrant in rural France picking grapes for a pittance, only allowed to see her children in supervised visits once a month. Scapegoated and outcast, destitute and desperate, Lisa decides to take radical action: early one morning, she sneaks into her in-laws’ farmhouse, takes back her children, sets the barn ablaze, and makes her escape. What follows is a white-knuckled road trip that explores human beings pushed to the edge.

Clearly, Lisa is not in her right mind, and as Harwicz deftly mingles a chorus of contradictory voices into her very unreliable narration, the listener comes to regard the protagonist with an unsettling mixture of sympathy and suspicion. Written in savage, chiseled prose, Unfit shoots off, a gripping chase that questions all our assumptions—and points out our hypocrisies—about motherhood, custody rights, love, violence, antisemitism, and migration.

By the acclaimed author of Die, My Love

3 hrs and 31 mins
June 1, 2026