by Harriet Armstrong

Publication date: 15 April 2025 - pre-order special offer till publication date

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.

See Paul Fulcher's five-star review on Goodreads.

‘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. This is – in its absolute specificity of detail, era, and embodiment – a timeless story of love, yearning and despair. It’s rare to read a novel so smart and self-aware which is also so powerfully vulnerable and candid. 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. In fact I don’t think I’ve ever felt for a character so deeply as the narrator of To Rest Our Minds and Bodies because I don’t think I’ve ever encountered a character so radically and vividly honest.’—Luke Kennard, author of Notes on the Sonnets

'The book describes brilliantly that in-between nature of university life. A striking work and recommended.' — Paul Fulcher

Paperback original with endpapers
250 pages, 180 x 120 mm
ISBN 978-1-7397783-6-1

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