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“Arresting, beautiful, humorous, observant, serious, all at the same time” — Paul Beatty, Booker Prize-winning author of The Sellout

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A lyrical and visceral short story collection, The Body of the Thing unpicks the hierarchies that thrum under our relationships, from first loves and lusts to motherhood and miscarriages, from sexual awakenings to final confrontations with death. Traversing bougie neighbourhoods in Manhattan, sun-drenched piazzas in Italy, coastal Maine, and the bustle of London, these stories chase the fallout when women’s bodies are valued for their beauty and youth, dismissed and discarded when ill, or made useful as parents and caregivers. Fluid, sensual, and fearless, The Body of the Thing is about looking at and living in the female body – and all of its complicated realities and wonders.

“These stories are contemporary portraits of life across continents. Jobanputra’s careful prose depicts all the anxiety and claustrophobia of being alive. I can’t remember the last time I read a collection so compulsively.” — Sarvat Hasin, author of Strange Girls

“Reading Karishma Jobanputra’s The Body is the Thing feels like driving on a highway by the ocean, with the windows down and the salt wind coming through: visceral, electric, alive, full of the full-throated song and hurtling velocity of youth itself, in all its frenzy and surrender and ache and mistakes and yearning.

These stories take seriously the molten selves we inhabit in our ambivalence and our regrets, our unmet longings; and in this way this book also holds the tender conversation happening inside that car humming down the highway: the forms of connection that ambush these characters when they least expect them.” — Leslie Jamison, author of Splinters

“Heady and visceral, sharp and intoxicating, these absorbing stories portray human desires, appetites, and obsessions in all their unruly beauty. Karishma Jobanputra is a bold and gifted writer – one to celebrate and one to watch.” — Ben Hinshaw, author of Exactly What You Mean

“Karishma pulls off a rare trick. Her strange world is incredibly compelling. Her cityscape is undefined and yet familiar, its people hover within seeking ever elusive connection.” — Vanessa Branson, author of One Hundred Summers

“Lyrical and specific, eloquent and real.” — Raffaella Barker, author of Come and Tell Me Some Lies