The Book of X

Sarah Rose Etter

£10.99

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Verve Books
10 January 2025
ISBN: 9780857309037
Paperback
240 pages

From the publisher

**Winner of the 2019 Shirley Jackson Award**
**A Best Book of the Year for VultureBuzzfeedEntropy Thrillist**
**Longlisted for the 2019 Believer Book Award**
**Longlisted for the 2019 Northern California 'Golden Poppy' Book Award**
**Longlisted for the 2020 VCU Cabell First Novelist Award**

A surreal exploration of one woman's life and death against a landscape of meat, office desks, and bad men.

The Book of X tells the tale of Cassie, a girl born with her stomach twisted in the shape of a knot. From childhood with her parents on the family meat farm, to a desk job in the city, to finally experiencing love, she grapples with her body, men, and society, all the while imagining a softer world than the one she is in.

Twining the drama of the everyday - school-age crushes, paying bills, the sickness of parents - with the surreal - rivers of thighs, men for sale, and fields of throats - Cassie's realities alternate to create a blurred, fantastic world of haunting beauty.

'I loved every page of this gorgeous, grotesque, heartbreaking novel'
- Carmen Maria Machado, author of Her Body and Other Parties  

'The Book of X traverses the mundane and the surreal - from grocery lists to blooming meat, menstrual blood to a jealousy removal shop - laying bare the absurdities of womanhood. A truly original writer, Etter continues to push the boundaries of her imagination... and ours'
- Melissa Broder, author of Death Valley  

'Utterly unique and remarkable... Sarah Rose Etter takes the surreal and expertly shapes it into a portrait that is as beautiful and compelling as it is horrifying and unbearable... Etter brilliantly, viciously lays bare what it means to be a woman in the world, what it means to hurt, to need, to want, so much it consumes everything'
- Roxane Gay, author of Bad Feminist