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The Shadow of the Object
  • Published: 16 April 2026
  • ISBN: 9781529969931
  • Imprint: Vintage Digital
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 240

The Shadow of the Object

Formats & editions
Hardback
14 Apr 2026
EBook
16 Apr 2026
Audiobook
16 Apr 2026
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A beautifully written and dreamlike new novel about metamorphosis, desire and magic lanterns from award-winning writer Chloe Aridjis

'One of our boldest writers' Deborah Levy

A magnificent work of shadow-play and a meditation on desire, metamorphosis and mortality.

Flora is visiting home in Mexico when the family dog leaps up and bites her hand. She winds up in hospital where she undergoes several surgeries under anaesthesia and meets Wilhelmina, an elderly German woman with pneumonia, who collects pre-cinema toys and instruments. The two of them embark on a series of dream-like conversations in the hospital corridors. 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 resumes her job polishing silver at a jewellery shop, and strikes up a strange friendship with Wilhelmina’s son, Max. As Flora dips in and out of her imagination, she is increasingly aware it’s not only the magic lantern that projects, and her perception of reality is subtly altered.

‘One of the most brilliant novelists working in English today’ Garth Greenwell

‘The politics of her prose is existential rather than anecdotal, as it was with Kafka’s’ Zadie Smith

‘A subtle and courageous writer’ Ali Smith

‘Chloe Aridjis is crafting a poetics of the strange’ TLS
  • Published: 16 April 2026
  • ISBN: 9781529969931
  • Imprint: Vintage Digital
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 240
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About the author

Chloe Aridjis

Chloe Aridjis was born in New York and grew up in the Netherlands and Mexico. She is the author of two previous novels, Book of Clouds, which won the Prix du Premier Roman Etranger in France, and Asunder. Chloe writes for various art journals and was a guest curator at Tate Liverpool. In 2014 she was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship. She lives in London.

portrait photo of Chloe Aridjis

Also by Chloe Aridjis

Sea Monsters
Asunder
Book of Clouds
See all

Praise for The Shadow of the Object

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

Jennifer Higgie

'Clandestine, compassionate, and ever so slightly off-kilter, Chloe Aridjis's magnificent sleight of hand reshuffles the novel and places before us a beautiful and mischievous magic lantern of a book that casts out a multitude of unforgettable scenes, while shining a steady granular light on the hidden depths of the human psyche.'

Claire-Louise Bennett

'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.'

Neel Mukherjee