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Publication Date: 10 January 2025
Format: Paperback
Extent: 240 pp
Our Price: 10.99
ISBN: 9780857309037
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Publication Date:8 August 2024
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Our Price: 6.99
ISBN: 9780857309044
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THE BOOK OF X
Sarah Rose Etter
**Winner of the 2019 Shirley Jackson Award**
**A Best Book of the Year for Vulture, Buzzfeed, Entropy & Thrillist**
**Longlisted for the 2019 Believer Book Award**
**Longlisted for the 2019 Northern California 'Golden Poppy' Book Award**
**Longlisted for the 2020 VCU Cabell First Novelist Award**
A surreal exploration of one woman's life and death against a landscape of meat, office desks, and bad men.
The Book of X tells the tale of Cassie, a girl born with her stomach twisted in the shape of a knot. From childhood with her parents on the family meat farm, to a desk job in the city, to finally experiencing love, she grapples with her body, men, and society, all the while imagining a softer world than the one she is in.
Twining the drama of the everyday - school-age crushes, paying bills, the sickness of parents - with the surreal - rivers of thighs, men for sale, and fields of throats - Cassie's realities alternate to create a blurred, fantastic world of haunting beauty.
READER REVIEWS FOR THE BOOK OF X
PRESS REVIEWS FOR The Book of X
'I loved every page of this gorgeous, grotesque, heartbreaking novel'
- Carmen Maria Machado, author of Her Body and Other Parties
'The Book of X traverses the mundane and the surreal - from grocery lists to blooming meat, menstrual blood to a jealousy removal shop - laying bare the absurdities of womanhood. A truly original writer, Etter continues to push the boundaries of her imagination... and ours'
- Melissa Broder, author of Death Valley
'Utterly unique and remarkable... Sarah Rose Etter takes the surreal and expertly shapes it into a portrait that is as beautiful and compelling as it is horrifying and unbearable... Etter brilliantly, viciously lays bare what it means to be a woman in the world, what it means to hurt, to need, to want, so much it consumes everything'
- Roxane Gay, author of Bad Feminist
'More surreal than traditional dystopia, this experimental novel follows a woman born with her stomach twisted into a literal knot, living in a world where female suffering is normalised. It's a powerful allegory for bodily autonomy, beauty standards and inherited pain'
- ELLE
'There are very few good reasons to use the word oneiric in a sentence and here is one of them: It's one of the few English adjectives appropriate to Sarah Rose Etter's novel about a woman born with a stomach disfigurement who navigates the world (as we all do) with the trepidation and fury and occasional exultation that results from having a disappointing body'
- Vulture (Best Books of 2019)
'Dizzying and grotesque... Etter has built an eerie, surreal world... and she seduces you into it with dreamy lyricism. You won't want to leave'
- Buzzfeed (Best Books of 2019)
'A stunning book which lives on the edge of magical realism but there is always an underlying sense of dread'
- Lucy Rose, author of The Lamb, The Nerd Daily
'Insightful and incisive, this book cuts deep into the failing heart of the feminine mystique'
- Amelia Gray, author of Isadora
'Sarah Rose Etter is a visionary. Perfectly paced, structurally audacious, and endlessly inventive, The Book of X is our new Revelation. Actually it's better than that. Etter's prose digs with emotion and a thousand unforgettable images. They just twist themselves deeper and deeper into your guts. It'll probably take years to cut them out'
- Scott McCLanahan, author of The Sarah Book
'The Book of X is a tremendous subversion of the disability as metaphor trope... A fabulist exploration into the reality of living with a chronic illness/invisible disability. No one sees Cassie's knot if she chooses not to show it, but it impacts every iota of her experience. In a grisly world of meat quarries, fantastical imagery, and ambiguously named settings, Cassie's condition is not disgusting or dramatized. It is the realest part of this surreal book'
- LitHub
'Etter's novel brings to mind idiosyncratic masterpieces like Joy Williams's The Changeling... Formally inventive, while also being easily digestible. I found myself reading it quickly, its images lingering in my mind, filling my dreams'
- LA Review of Books
'A profound meditation on womanhood and heredity, bullying and plastic surgery -- loneliness'
- Chicago Review of Books
'Etter has created that rare beast: an effective, startling poetic novel. Its story is coherent and progressive; Cassie herself is intensely sympathetic. The book is unconventional but engaging, and eminently readable'
- New York Journal of Books
