Les Fugitives / June 2025
Winner of the Betty Trask Prize 2026
Shortlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize 2026
Press
'The book...gradually flowers into something extraordinary: a feminist statement of mental unravelling, which is also a plea for the life of the mind. This is marvellously realised as the novel unfolds into a study of interiority and narrative, both an embrace of and a resistance against nihilism. Armstrong has created a form away from such debasing tropes and genres as “sad girl” lit... Armstrong’s work seems both new and utterly timeless.'
'Armstrong’s voice is by turns jejune, candid and ludic, but always aware of its effects and its commitment to emotional truth...It announces Armstrong as a bright and singular voice in literary fiction.'
‘It’s rare to encounter so purely candid and redolent a portrait of a life... The novel inspires something close to exaltation...To Rest Our Minds and Bodies is a fraught chamber piece of emotional intensity: an age-old story – of the highs and lows of first love, and of a young person finding their place in the world – told in a way that feels unsettling, exciting and very fresh.’
‘There's a piercing brightness in every sentence, a flash of insight...To Rest Our Minds & Bodies is luminous, unsettling and emotionally honest.'
‘The book brilliantly focuses on what it means to simulate emotions vs. to feel emotions... The story hinges on a first love–come–unrequited romantic experience...This asymmetrical power dynamic, rooted in devotion, sets the novel on a path of relational uncertainty, emotional restraint, and an ongoing tension between mechanical detachment and human vulnerability.’
The Guardian: Best fiction of 2025
Endorsements
'There is great skill and craft involved in the construction of a voice which feels simultaneously as alive and deliberate as Harriet's does...Harriet is unafraid to look honestly at sex, love and humiliation and consequently has written a book which is somehow both confronting and warm.' - Rachel Connolly
'Armstrong’s prose has that meticulous and urgent quality reminiscent of Beckett and Duras, achieving the same uncanny shared consciousness...It charts some deep and dark territories we all know but barely acknowledge. It cuts through the platitudes of love and life in a way most writers wouldn’t dare.' - Luke Kennard
'There is something so beautifully gentle, humane and optimistic about the writing, that is uplifting despite the sadness of the plot. This is ultimately unflinching and brave prose.' - S. J. Naudé
'A novel of humiliations and revelations where heartbreak gets logged in a spreadsheet. Harriet Armstrong has a singular voice, writing girlhood like a field study — obsessive, precise, and unexpectedly tender.' - Madeline Cash
'An assertive and captivating novel, To Rest Our Minds and Bodies is a poignant portrait of the uncertain state of being alive.' - Rebecca Watson
'A devastating page-turner of an impossible love story, with insight and surprise on every page. Reading this felt like being given pure, clean glasses after wearing really stressfully and depressingly dirty glasses for many years.' - Adelaide Faith
'Harriet Armstrong's To Rest Our Minds and Bodies is an astonishingly poised, absorbing debut...It combines conceptual erudition with an attention to the body, sexuality and the cadences of everyday life in a voice that is both sophisticated and winningly uncynical.' - Alice Blackhurst
'The rarest debut work... a must read, a new immediate classic, and a heart wrenching work of fiction that for once tells the real truth about being young, ravenous, desperate, too big for the container of the body.' - Luke Goebel
Translation Rights
German: Luchterhand (PRH) / French: Mercure de France / Turkish: Holden Kitap / Spanish: Reservoir (PRH) / Czech: Paseka