The Body Builders
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- $15.99
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- $15.99
Publisher Description
'I was enraptured by this book. The Body Builders exhibits Albertine Clarke's remarkable gifts - the boldness and precision of her imagination, the breadth of her ethical and intellectual concerns. She is a fearless writer, and I felt a shiver of admiration as I read every page' KATIE KITAMURA
'If Philip K. Dick had written The Bell Jar, it may have resembled The Body Builders - at once smooth as android skin and sharp as shards of broken mirror. A stunning and haunting debut' CAMILLE BORDAS
'By turns tender and unsettling, The Body Builders is a spare yet profound enquiry into the bonds of family and the limits of the self, and what it means to be connected to other people. Full of stylish and unexpected touches - a debut that marks an important new talent' TASH AW
'An exciting and remarkably controlled debut using a brilliant sci-fi concept to tell a story about estrangement, selfhood, and love' CATHERINE LACEY
'Radically strange and engrossing... With great clarity and imaginative resourcefulness, The Body Builders feels like a literary take on Polanski's Repulsion coupled with Michel Gondry's Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. While flirting with the subgenres of both body horror and the pejoratively named sad girl lit, the novel is finally a forceful performance from a promising new talent' Jude Cooke, GUARDIAN BOOK OF THE DAY
Ada lives a solitary life in London. A young adult haunted by her lonely childhood, she spends her days swimming, occasionally visiting her cousin, meeting people for drinks, ignoring invitations.
When she meets a man named Atticus by the pool, Ada immediately senses an intimate connection between them, as if they share a life in a way she can't explain. Little by little, Ada's estrangement from all that is familiar to her widens, as though she is seeing her reflection through a mirror, pieces of it falling away. She worries she may be losing her mind.
Eventually, Ada's attachment to the world and her body itself fails completely. She is jolted into a new, artificial environment - The Facility - apparently created and designed just for her.
When a person's life is inherently one of isolation, are our connections with those around us merely projections of ourselves? And if not, where do they come from?
With precision, subtlety, and confidence Albertine Clarke transforms the speculative into an entirely singular experience of deep interiority. The Body Builders lands like a blow, widening a crack that allows us to perceive the world differently than we ever imagined.
'Dry, deadpan, elegant . . . With this book, Clarke joins the ranks of allied fantasists such as Graham Joyce, Jonathan Carroll, Robert Aickman, and Haruki Murakami as dealers in the mundanely unsettling and comfortingly unreal' LOCUS
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Clarke debuts with an alluring fever dream of a novel about a young woman who enters an alternate reality. From a young age, Ada hears voices that tell her about things before they happen, such as her parents' divorce. Years later, in London, she meets an older American man named Atticus at her apartment building's pool. Seeing him makes her think she should have been him. After he returns to his family in the U.S., Ada can see and inhabit Atticus's life when she looks in mirrors, where she sees his face instead of her own. Later, she wakes up in a white room where she meets a man named Don who confirms her suspicion that the voices she hears in her head come from an implant placed at the back of her mouth when she was a child. He offers to switch her body with an "identical synthetic copy" to help her cope with her feelings of dissociation. Ada agrees, and things get even weirder, as when she notices during a swim that she's leaking saltwater from the back of her head. Clarke grounds the bizarre details and vivid imagery in meticulous prose ("At first she thought the voice had come out of the radio, but then she realized it was inside her head, as if somebody had put it there"). Readers will find much to dissect in this intriguing story of an existential crisis.
