The Body Builders

A mesmerising debut - dreamlike, disturbing and deeply affecting - about alienation, loneliness, and the fragile borders between our bodies and minds by a conspiculously gifted young writer to watch

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

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

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

An exciting and remarkably controlled debut using a brilliant sci-fi concept to tell a story about estrangement, selfhood, and love

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

[Clarke] is a new talent doing interesting things, and [ The Body Builders ] is a first novel with a distinctive flavour. Its like no other debut out there

Ada is a unique protagonist . . . This strange, surreal story is beautifully written and full of heart and longing

Ambitious, imaginative and accomplished, this feverish tale is an allegory for the isolation of modern life and the pain felt by fractured families

Clarke's dry, deadpan, elegant prose is extremely effective at drawing the reader into the most outré situations, rendering them tactile and believable . . . Ada's interior life, however abnormal, is also richly conjured , and the smallish cast is evoked with a telling particularity . . . 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

Dreamlike and unsettling . . . With hypnotic prose and haunting imagery, this is startling book

Clarke's gift for worldbuilding and character creation is arresting from the opening pages . She manages to lead readers into a space in which time, place, and identity blur and shift like the shimmer on an oil slick without ever losing them - an admirable feat

An alluring fever dream of a novel . . Clarke grounds the bizarre details and vivid imagery in meticulous prose . . . Readers will find much to dissect in this intriguing story of an existential crisis

Albertine Clarke is originally from London but lives in Brooklyn, New York. The Body Builders is her first novel.