To Rest Our Minds and Bodies

Synopsis

A young woman reckons with a romantic obsession in this mesmerising debut campus novel which confronts thorny gender relations, contradictory desires, consent, and unravelling mental health within Gen Z.

What does it mean to be a person? In her final year of university, our narrator is struggling to relate to the world around her and find her place within it. Drifting from lectures on gifts, vision, the history of global warming to Louise Bourgeois exhibitions to study groups discussing babies manipulating objects, she finds nothing to further her search for the great revelation she has been promised – except, perhaps, for her budding interest in a fellow student named Luke. Will this relationship bring the understanding of reality she is yearning for, or will Luke turn out to be just as incomprehensible as everything else?

A debut novel from a voice as unique as it is relatable, To Rest Our Minds and Bodies queries the nature of one’s experience, mapping the disintegration of a young woman’s sense of self and engagement with the physical world, in prose that is keenly observant, delightfully wry, and utterly despairing. An anti- Bildungsroman for the pandemic generation.