The Shadow of the Object

Chloe Aridjis

$34.99

Paperback

Forthcoming
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English

Chatto & Windus
16 April 2026

Modern & contemporary fiction (post c 1945)

A beautifully written and dreamlike new novel about metamorphosis, desire and magic lanterns from award-winning writer Chloe Aridjis

'One of our boldest writers' Deborah Levy

A magnificent work of shadow-play and a meditation on desire, metamorphosis and mortality.

Flora is visiting home in Mexico when the family dog leaps up and bites her hand. She winds up in hospital where she undergoes several surgeries under anaesthesia and meets Wilhelmina, an elderly German woman with pneumonia, who collects pre-cinema toys and instruments. The two of them embark on a series of dream-like conversations in the hospital corridors. Wilhelmina puts on a magic lantern show for Flora, leaving her spellbound.

When things take an unexpected turn, Flora finds herself entrusted with an important mission. She returns to London, where she resumes her job polishing silver at a jewellery shop, and strikes up a strange friendship with Wilhelmina's son, Max. As Flora dips in and out of her imagination, she is increasingly aware it's not only the magic lantern that projects, and her perception of reality is subtly altered.

'One of the most brilliant novelists working in English today' Garth Greenwell

'The politics of her prose is existential rather than anecdotal, as it was with Kafka's' Zadie Smith

'A subtle and courageous writer' Ali Smith

'Chloe Aridjis is crafting a poetics of the strange' TLS

By: Chloe Aridjis
Imprint: Chatto & Windus
Country of Publication: United Kingdom
Dimensions: Height: 216mm, Width: 135mm, Spine: 20mm
Weight: 300g
ISBN: 9781784746384
ISBN 10: 178474638X
Pages: 240
Publication Date: 16 April 2026
Audience: General/trade , ELT Advanced
Format: Paperback
Publisher's Status: Forthcoming

Chloe Aridjis is the author of Book of Clouds, which won the Prix du Premier Roman Etranger in France, Asunder, and Sea Monsters, winner of the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. She writes for various art journals and was a guest curator at Tate Liverpool. In 2014 she was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship. Her most recent book is the collection Dialogue with a Somnambulist; Stories, Essays, and a Portrait Gallery. She lives in London.