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

**Winner of the Shirley Jackson Award for Best Novel** **Longlisted for the Believer Book Award, the Northern California 'Golden Poppy' Book Award & the VCU Cabell First Novelist Award** **A Best Book of the Year for Vulture, Buzzfeed, Entropy & Thrillist**

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.

From the author Ripe comes a surreal exploration of one woman's life and death against a landscape of meat, office desks and bad men.

Perfect for fans of Rouge by Mona Awad, Nightbitch by Rachel Yoder and Our Wives Under the Sea by Julia Armfield.

'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

'Sarah Rose Etter is a visionary. Perfectly paced, structurally audacious, and endlessly inventive, The Book of X is our new Revelation' - Scott McCLanahan, author of The Sarah Book

© 2024 Verve Books (Ebook): 9780857309044

Release date

Ebook: 8 August 2024