The Shadow of the Object

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**Longlisted for the 2026 Booker Prize**
‘A glowing, mythopoeic book’ AK Blakemore
‘A beautiful, eerie, grief-haunted novel’ Chris Power

Flora is visiting home in Mexico when the family dog bites her hand. She winds up in hospital where she undergoes several surgeries under anaesthesia. Here, she meets Wilhelmina, an elderly German woman with pneumonia, who collects pre-cinema toys. They embark on a series of dream-like conversations and 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 strikes up a strange friendship with Wilhelmina's son, Max, and finds her perception of reality is subtly altered.

‘A beguiling tale of loss and connection’ The Times
‘A virtuoso of the gorgeously written art novel’ Daily Mail
‘Extraordinary …both intoxicating and unsettling’ Irish Times
‘Aridjis is a revolutionary who is quietly changing the whole novel form’ Neel Mukherjee

'We were charmed by the novel’s meditation on friendship and grief, and its suggestion that the most meaningful truths can be found in the shadows.'
Booker Prize Judges 2026

About Chloe Aridjis

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.

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Details

Imprint: Vintage
Published: 15/04/2027
ISBN: 9781529969948
Length: 192 pages
Price: £9.99

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The Shadow of the Object

Format:

Pre-order:

'We were charmed by the novel’s meditation on friendship and grief, and its suggestion that the most meaningful truths can be found in the shadows.'

'Chloe Aridjis is a revolutionary who is quietly changing the whole novel form. She is mining the richest seam in the vast field of fiction and coming up with gold. Her radiantly lyrical and intelligent writing is thrilling to read.'

'The Shadow of the Object would be an immense achievement based on the strange, impressionistic beauty of its prose alone... [a] glowing, mythopoeic book... I can only concur with Aridjis’s many admirers that she is one of the boldest writers at work in English today.'

'In the world The Shadow of the Object brings to light – now sharply focused, now only uncertainly defined – Chloe Aridjis patiently layers signs and symbols into a resonant network. A beautiful, eerie, grief-haunted novel.'

'With The Shadow of the Object Aridjis cements her status as the laureate of the peripatetic — of all that’s serendipitous, strange, improbable and, for these very reasons, true.'

'There is a keen intelligence and an eerie sensuality to everything that Chloe Aridjis writes. Reading The Shadow of the Object is a little like entering a dream state. A subtly addictive and intensely atmospheric experience. You won’t want to wake up.'

'Lucid and fabulous, and it bites.'

'A wildly brilliant and beautifully crafted novel. By turns mesmerising, magical, elegiac and funny, it's utterly compelling, original and surprising. I devoured it.'

[An] enchanting new novel… Aridjis never allows her narrative to become surreal, but revels in the ‘marvellous real’. She creates a world full of wonder without indulging in the impossible

About Chloe Aridjis

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