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Theme

The Body

Fiction about body image, physicality and self-perception — novels in which the body becomes a site of control, resistance and desire

Reviews filed under this theme.

Olga Ravn

The Employees

An investigation into strange objects aboard a generational ship escalates into a labour dispute the organisation acknowledges and buries simultaneously.

Marie Darrieussecq

How to Make a Woman

Two accounts of the same fifteen years, measuring what one woman inherits against what the other improvises across the road.

Babak Lakghomi

South

Political injury reassigned as private failure, each record altered before it can testify, until only the safer account survives in print.

Ana Paula Maia

Bury Your Dead

A roadside depot grinds animal carcasses while human corpses wait on a morgue van that never starts. Dignity falls to whoever will carry a body.

Erinrose Mager

Hot Fruit

Orphanage origins, family objects, meals and fables shape lives built around beginnings that cannot be securely known.

Alex Hyde

Exhibition

A photographer watches her own images sell as a dead woman's self-portraits. The question is which of them made the work.

Claudia Piñeiro

Elena Knows

A mother crosses Buenos Aires after her daughter is found dead in a church belfry, certain that rain proves what the police refuse to see.

Shahrnush Parsipur

Women Without Men

A compressed feminist fable set around 1950s Iran, where women leave male authority and find freedom taking stranger, unfinished forms.

George Orwell

1984

Orwell builds dread out of objects, rooms and procedures. The final section explains what the first two hundred pages made you feel.

Andrew Miller

The Land in Winter

During the winter of 1962–63, four people try to keep marriages, animals, patients and unborn children alive after the terms of their lives have begun to fail.