Always: A Novel (Aud Torvingen)

By: Nicola Griffith

Published by Picador, 2025-06-03

"This is the third thrill ride featuring Torvingen, the most complex yet...Little is held back: the violence, the eroticism, the shocking plot turns..."
—Seattle Post-Intelligencer

"If Jack Reacher had a sister, she'd be Aud Torvingen . . . he would love her, but he'd be a little scared of her, too."
―Lee Child

Aud Torvingen has never worried about violence. To her it is simply a tool, one of many, to be used, as appropriate, with dispassion, speed, and precision. In Always, she takes on a new challenge: teaching a group of ordinary Atlanta women self-defense skills.

It doesn’t matter how well trained you are, how big, how fast, how strong; there will always be someone out there bigger or faster or stronger. Always. That’s what Aud tells her students—but she never imagined the consequences of imparting that lesson, which shake her to the core.

To regroup, she travels to Seattle to meet her Norwegian diplomat mother and her mother’s new husband. She’s also there to handle what looks to be a run-of-the-mill fraud at one of her investment properties, currently being used as a movie set. Big money is in play, and it seems someone is sabotaging the production.

In intertwined Seattle and Atlanta narratives—seductive, and breathtakingly taut—Nicola Griffith pushes Aud to the limits of self-reliance and makes Aud face the appalling, and appealing, prospect of allowing herself to need other people.

"In Always, the award-winning Griffith ratchets her fiction, plot, and narrative up yet another notch...Always is a novel of compelling and complex literary substance."
—The Baltimore Sun

"Crime and love, set against the backdrop of the Seattle skyline, are a compelling mix. Aud Torvingen is like no protagonist in fiction, male or female, and her complexity makes for fascinating fiction"
—The Oregonian

"Yowza!...synergy of action and adrenaline... Fist-slamming physicality is beautifully balanced with raised emotional stakes as Griffith dares to take her lethally forceful heroine to a new level."
—Booklist (starred review)

"Nicola Griffith's Aud Torvingen novels are among the finest, most original crime fiction I've read...I am forever Ms. Griffith's fan."
—Robert Crais

"Aud is a hero we need now more than ever...Griffith has created one of the most intriguing and most unforgettable characters in detective fiction—or really anywhere."
—Ivy Pochoda

"WIthout Aud, it's hard to see how there could have been a Lisbeth Salander."
—Val McDermid

"I can't rave enough."
—Dennis Lehane