In a near-future society of bodily maintenance, surveillance and increasingly normalised technological intervention, a woman retreats to the forest and begins recording what has happened to her.

Her body is failing in eerie, administered ways; elsewhere exists another woman, genetically identical to her, raised as a reserve of replacement organs. Darrieussecq writes with a clipped, unstable directness that suits the novel’s uncertainty. The narrator moves between confession, testimony and fractured recollection, trying to reconstruct the systems that shaped her while also escaping their logic. The forest is not romantic.

Originally published in French as Notre vie dans les forêts, the novel has the eerie efficiency of a thought experiment but keeps returning to something messier: the horror of being considered interchangeable with oneself.

Text Publishing, Melbourne, 2018. First Australian edition. Paperback. Light shelf wear and minor rubbing to covers; internally clean and sound. Translated from the French by Penny Hueston.