The Body Builders - Albertine Clarke

Ada lives a solitary life. She spends her days swimming in her apartment building''s pool, occasionally visiting her cousin Francesca, meeting people for drinks, navigating the social mores of a cold and isolating London. Ada''s parents are recently divorced: her father spends his days at the gym, warm with human proximity. Her mother spends her days alone.

When she meets a man named Atticus by the pool, Ada immediately senses an intimate connection between them: as if they share a life, in a way she can''t explain, maybe even a consciousness. Little by little, Ada''s estrangement from her familiar surroundings, memories and reality widens, as though she is seeing her reflection through a mirror, pieces of it falling away. She worries she may be losing her mind.

After her mother entreats Ada to join her on a remote Greek holiday, Ada''s connection to her world and her body itself, falls away completely. She is jolted into a new, artificial environment - The Facility: a place apparently designed to meet her every wish, but where secrets hide along endless hallways and behind closed doors.

When a person''s life, in the odd space between mind and body, is inherently one of isolation, are our connections with those around us merely projections of ourselves? And if not, where do they come from?

With precision, subtlety, and confidence Albertine Clarke transforms touches of the sci-fi into an entirely singular experience of deep interiority. The Body Builders lands like a blow, widening a crack that allows us to perceive the world differently than we ever imagined.