Description

In her final year of a degree in psychology, and struggling to relate to the world around her and find her place within it, a young woman drifts from lectures on gifts, vision, the history of global warming, and study groups discussing babies manipulating objects. Yet nothing seems to bring her closer to the great insight she’s been promised – except, perhaps, for her budding interest in a fellow student named Luke, a postgraduate in computer sciences, with whom a series of seemingly mundane encounters provides her with a hint of what she might be looking for – a hidden meaning to all that surrounds her. But a chasm between them that grows and shrinks unexpectedly calls into question whether he might be as incomprehensible as the world around her. She yearns, and continues to endeavour to shape her experiences and environment – a Louise Bourgeois exhibition, the underwhelming men she meets on Tinder, a Mitski song, the dreams she has of Luke’s ex-girlfriend – she narrates all as she grapples with questions of embodiment and subjectivity.

Set in an unnamed campus in England in the early 2020s, 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 her struggle to keep a grip on reality. From a voice as unique as it is relatable, and in prose that is keenly observant, delightfully wry, and utterly despairing, the anonymous narrator of this unconventional coming-of-age novel is as brave as she is unforgettable.

‘A work of art. Armstrong’s prose has that meticulous and urgent quality reminiscent of Beckett and Duras, achieving the same uncanny shared consciousness that keeps you hooked from the first sentence… It charts some deep and dark territories we all know but barely acknowledge. It cuts through the platitudes of love and life in a way most writers wouldn’t dare.’ – Luke Kennard, author of Notes on the Sonnets

‘There is great skill and craft involved in the construction of a voice which feels simultaneously as alive and deliberate… Harriet Armstrong is unafraid to look honestly at sex, love and humiliation and consequently has written a book which is somehow both confronting and warm.’-Rachel Connolly, author of Lazy City

‘An assertive and captivating novel, To Rest Our Minds and Bodies is a poignant portrait of the uncertain state of being alive.’ – Rebecca Watson, author of I Will Crash

‘The rarest debut… a must read, a new immediate classic, a heart-wrenching work of fiction that for once tells the real truth about being young, ravenous, desperate, too big for the container of the body of youth…. This novel is written in gold – every line is marvellous and perfect. I can’t believe this novel exists.’ – Luke Goebel, author of Fourteen Stories, None of Them Are Yours

‘A novel of humiliations and revelations where heartbreak gets logged in a spreadsheet. Harriet Armstrong has a singular voice, writing girlhood like a field study – obsessive, precise, and unexpectedly tender.’- Madeline Cash, author of Earth Angel

‘There is something so beautifully gentle, humane and optimistic about the writing, that is uplifting despite the sadness of the plot. There is a real sense of freedom in the prose – an openness, a plasticity, a suppleness. This is ultimately unflinching and brave prose.’ – SJ Naude, author of The Alphabet of Birds

‘A devastating page-turner of an impossible love story, with insight and surprise on every page. Reading this felt like being given pure, clean glasses after wearing really stressfully and depressingly dirty glasses for many years.’- Adelaide Faith, author of Happiness Forever

‘An astonishingly poised, absorbing debut. It combines conceptual erudition with an attention to the body, sexuality and the cadences of everyday life in a voice that is both sophisticated and winningly uncynical.’- Alice Blackhurst, author of Luxury, Sensation and the Moving Image

Publisher Review

'Harriet Armstrong's singular, arresting debut... gradually flowers into something extraordinary: a feminist statement of mental unravelling, which is also a plea for the life of the mind... Marvellously realised... a study of interiority and narrative, both an embrace of and a resistance against nihilism. Armstrong has created a form away from such debasing tropes and genres as "sad girl" lit... [her] work seems both new and utterly timeless.' - Catherine Taylor, Observer 'It's rare to encounter so purely candid and redolent a portrait of a life . . . the novel inspires something closer to exaltation . . . To Rest Our Minds and Bodies is a fraught chamber piece of emotional intensity: an age-old story - of the highs and lows of first love, and of a young person finding their place in the world - told in a way that feels unsettling, exciting and very fresh.' - Lucy Scholes, Daily Telegraph 'Armstrong expertly adumbrates the emotional intensity and vulnerability of first love, with every page bearing a startling observation or wry aside.[...] What's compelling is that [...] the narrator has no perspective through which to filter her descent. At times the novel is unbearably intense, like experiencing the essence of obsession as it's lived in every moment -- which is not to say that it isn't also very funny. [...] While cerebral and obsessively analytical, the narrator is equally fervent about engaging with the messily somatic. [...] The final scene is as deft and devastating as the conclusion to a Cheever story. [To Rest Our Minds and Bodies] announces Armstrong as a bright and singular voice in literary fiction.' - Jude Cook, Guardian 'Harriet Armstrong's To Rest Our Minds and Bodies is a true original: ambitious, stylish and wonderfully uncynical. It reads like The Bell Jar for Gen Z, a coming-of-age novel in which we're drawn deep into the volcanic interior of girlhood... luminous, unsettling and emotionally honest. Armstrong has captured not how things are, but how they feel. In doing so, she has crafted a style that is urgently contemporary and unmistakably her own.' - Ruby Eastwood, Irish Times 'The syntax is unusual and highly specific, punctuated by hundreds of 'somehow's, 'actually's and 'suddenly's, as though the young narrator anticipates an incredulous reader. But the effect is to recreate the way that, at that age, it feels like everything that happens to you is happening for the first time ever.' - 'What we're reading this week - by the Times books team', Laura Hackett, The Times 'An impressive debut novel, To Rest our Minds and Bodies, by Harriet Armstong, sees a neurodiverse protagonist fearlessly navigate her bewilderment at her body's sexual awakening and her mind's emotional upheavals. Another disarmingly honest take on intimate womanhood, in this case from the rare perspective of an autistic protagonist. This is a beautifully written novel by a new British talent.' - Fiona O'Connor, Morning Star, Best Books of the Year 'Its subject might resemble that of many other debut novels, but Armstrong's book is distinguished by a sophisticated narrative voice, at once lucid and subtly ironic. [...] The experiences chronicled [in To Rest Our Minds and Bodies] may be those of someone in their early twenties, but this is a work of real maturity.' - Orlando Reade, Literary Review 'The book [...] brilliantly focuses on what it means to simulate emotions vs. to feel emotions.[...] The story hinges on a first love-come-unrequited romantic experience [...]. This asymmetrical power dynamic, rooted in devotion, sets the novel on a path of relational uncertainty, emotional restraint, and an ongoing tension between mechanical detachment and human vulnerability.' - Review 31 'Armstrong's debut is an unflinching testament to the pains of youth, told sensitively and in a manner so evocative that you'll return to it again and again.' - Frances Forbes-Carbines, wonders and wickedness 'Aligns with contemporary writing such as Convenience Store Woman... The build-up of simple phrases makes for beautiful depictions of intimacy... This is deeply absorbing... The end of the novel is a tour de force.' - Fiona O'Connor, Morning Star