"This masterfully-crafted literary debut dissects disconnection, alienation and identity with incisive punch, and dream-like disorientation."
Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar meets mind-bending speculative sci-fi: in The Body Builders, Albertine Clarke has crafted a novel that’s at once cerebral and hauntingly moving as it explores identity, perception and profound loneliness through a young woman who feels entirely disconnected from the world, and from her own body and mind.
Ada has a secret she’s “never told anyone. There were things she knew that she should have no way of knowing”. It’s been this way since her lonely childhood, when the voice told her that her mother had killed the family dog, and that her parents were getting a divorce. Living a largely solitary life in London, her perceptions shift when she sees a man at the pool: “When she looked at him she felt sure that she knew exactly who he was…as if they were two identical objects from the same manufacturer.
Both of them were separate from other people”. For his part, soon after their first exchange, Atticus announces that he feels like he’s known Ada for a very long time.
After Atticus suddenly returns to California, after declaring he loves her, Ada sees him reflected back at her in mirrors, and “wondered if she might be insane”. Soon after, she wakes in a white room, where she’s greeted by a man in a white coat who declares, “We think we can help you… We want to know what would happen if we gave you access to the truth”. In the disorientating context of this Facility, where other residents live “in their own dreamlands, drifting down the corridors with satisfied smiles on their faces, experiencing things she had no access to”, Ada’s existence slides between shifting realities and the white room.
Painted with fine strokes and a steady hand through an escalating fever-dream narrative, The Body Builders comes recommended for those who read fiction to think and feel altered.
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.
| Primary Genre | General Fiction |
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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.
The Body Builders features in the following genres: Literary Pick of the Month, General Fiction, Modern and Contemporary Fiction
Paperback, Hardback. £15.29, down from the £16.99 cover price. In Stock.
The Body Builders was written by Albertine Clarke and published by Corsair an imprint of Little, Brown
The Body Builders has 240 pages
£15.29, reduced from £16.99. In Stock.
