Body Friend - by Katherine Brabon (Hardcover)

About the Book

Book Synopsis

A potent novel about chronic illness and the circular nature of recovery-shortlisted for the major Australian literary award The Stella Prize.

In the wake of a major operation, a twenty-eight-year-old woman with chronic illness has twelve weeks to heal, or rather, to acclimate to her new body and prepare herself to leave the routines, comforts, and interiority of her convalescence. In the hydrotherapy pool, she meets Frida, a young woman who looks strikingly similar to her and is also in a state of recovery. But Frida sees her chronic illness as something to overcome and her body as something to control. She adores the pool and pushes the narrator and herself toward an active life, relentlessly pursuing the prevailing narrative of illness followed by recovery.

But the narrator also happens upon Sylvia, another young, convalescing woman, resting on a bench in a nearby park, which the narrator frequents on the days she is too ill to swim. Sylvia understands her body and the narrator's in a different way, gently encouraging her to rest, to perceive illness as something happening to her, but which does not define her.

Throughout the narrator's recovery, these women shadow, overlap, mirror, and complicate one another, and what begins as two seemingly undemanding friendships is challenged by what each woman asks of the narrator, of themselves, and of their bodies.

Review Quotes

"Katherine Brabon's Body Friend is a tender ode to the recursive mysteries of the body and the need to find ourselves in other people. The narrator's pull between Frida and Sylvia, between effort and surrender, haunted and compelled me. This book speaks to you with a delicate, iron grace, endlessly returning.
" --Alyssa Songsiridej, author of LITTLE RABBIT

"At once a feverish investigation of the body's limits and a hypnotic account of city walks, swimming, and friendship. I loved the intimacy of these pages." --Aysegül Savas, author of THE ANTHROPOLOGISTS and WHITE ON WHITE

"The novel's emotional core is heated by lyrical musings on the body and its relationship to language and narrative . . . This is an illuminating reflection on what it means to live with pain." --Publishers Weekly

"Never before have I read a book with such a compelling investigation of illness and pain, recovery and rest. Brabon writes with unwavering insight and intelligence; Body Friend inspires me to better understand my own friendships, my own life in a body. I tore through it. I will be thinking about this book for a long, long time." --Anna Hogeland, author of THE LONG ANSWER

"A compelling and deeply insightful reckoning with illness, intimacy, estrangement and control, Body Friend is a novel of rare grace . . . Her sentences are a tonic, offering the clarity and exquisite pleasure of swimming in calm, cool water." --Madelaine Lucas, author of THIRST FOR SALT

"Body Friend is a deeply intimate tribute to the fragile and porous self, written in prose of rare clarity and tenderness. I felt everything reading this book." --Claire Thomas, author of THE PERFORMANCE and FUGITIVE BLUE

"Beautiful, razor sharp and infused with an intelligence that cuts to the bone." --Stephanie Bishop, author of THE ANNIVERSARY

"I've never read anything like Katherine Brabon's Body Friend. This book is a gift, an examination of a life in pain that isn't at all painful to read. Brabon's fearless and clear-eyed exploration strips some power from pain and illuminates parts of the human experience that have yet to be written about-the virtue demanded from patients by the world and by ourselves, as well as the complexities of friendship." --Karen Havelin, author of PLEASE READ THIS LEAFLET CAREFULLY

"An unforgettable study in intimacy. Expect to be wowed." --Oprah Daily

"[An] elegant literary tale . . . Body Friend's pitch-perfect conclusion offers intimacy, knowledge, and, perhaps, a precious glimmer of understanding." --Washington Independent Review of Books

"Utterly absorbing, entirely one-of-a-kind . . . Body Friend is an acutely observed exploration of chronic pain, revealing an uncommon richness and resonance behind experiences that so often feel dull and deadening. Beyond that, it's an insightful and fresh meditation on the dualities we all negotiate between mind and body, control and submission, devotion and guilt, hope and despair . . . Insistent, rhythmic, immersive . . . Reading it feels like a plunge into cool water, both bracing and relieving, as intimately familiar as it's surprising. The gift of this book will stay with me for a long time." --Helena de Bres, author of HOW TO BE MULTIPLE: THE PHILOSOPHY OF TWINS

"Katherine Brabon distinguished herself with her first novels . . . but she has surpassed these and reached an early career pinnacle . . . Body Friend is a sculptured, sensory reflection on pain . . . The plot unfolds artfully and with precision to surprise and exceed readers' expectations. Recommended for discerning readers of nuanced fiction." --Books + Publishing (Australia)

"Body Friend is a kind of ghost story by stealth, an account of devotion, obsession and chronic pain that reveals a netherworld inside this one. It is told with such delicacy, with such a tender and insistent voice, that it becomes-uncannily, thrillingly-luminous." --Miles Allinson, author of FEVER OF ANIMALS and IN MOONLAND

"Brabon writes some of the most beautiful prose I've ever read, and this book is both muted and raw, like pain itself. A love letter to a body, to relationship and connection, and to water, Brabon explores what we need and how we need it with astonishing wisdom and candour." --Laura McPhee-Browne, author of CHERRY BEACH and LITTLE PLUM

"Body Friend is a remarkable and unflinching work that highlights, quietly and profoundly, the tedium and horror of living with chronic pain, but that also shows the lengths we go to understand ourselves, and to survive. Brabon's writing is important, and brave." --Oliver Mol, author of TRAIN LORD

"This is a novel of experiential heft and eloquence, which gives shape to the complexities of chronic pain." --Stella Prize Judges (Australia)

About the Author