Bodies bodies bodies. Medical, social, sexual, mechanical, historical.

One thread follows a girl in 1950s Copenhagen who is paralysed by polio and placed inside an iron lung; another moves back forty years to a child known as “Boy” in an orphanage near Budapest, whose body refuses the categories being imposed on it. Across time, illness, gender, machinery and desire begin to speak to each other in ways that feel like a current running under the floorboards.

This is literary fiction with a fever-glass quality: intimate, bodily, eerie, and unusually precise. Reffstrup is working in the territory of adolescence, embodiment, medical control, sexuality and transformation, but without turning any of it into a neat little lesson, thank god. One for readers who like their fiction translated, unsettling, formally alert, and interested in what happens when a body becomes a site of interpretation before it gets to become a self.

First English-language edition, first published in Great Britain by Peirene Press, 2025. Translated from the Danish by Hunter Simpson. Paperback. Excellent used condition with only very light shelf/handling wear. Pages clean, binding sound.