Harriet Armstrong’s To Rest Our Minds and Bodies is a true original: ambitious, stylish and wonderfully uncynical. It reads like The Bell Jar for Gen Z, a coming-of-age novel in which very little outwardly happens, yet we’re drawn deep into the volcanic interior of girlhood.
Set in an unnamed English university town, the novel follows its narrator through her final year as she attends lectures, attempts to lose her virginity and moves through a blur of dates, pub trips and club nights. These events might seem mundane but, in her telling, nothing feels ordinary.
There’s a piercing brightness in every sentence, a flash of insight. The narrator views the world with a kind of autistic purity, encountering everything as if for the first time, each moment lit up with sensory detail, every social exchange charged with emotion.
“I loved that night, I loved moving my body in a vague unconscious way and watching Anna and Jacob dance with each other, a sarcastic sort of dance as if they were dancing together but also mocking the idea that they might be dancing together.”
The quiet beauty of this sentence lies in its rhythm and hesitancy, its breathless build mirroring the moment’s ecstasy. Armstrong’s real ambition becomes clear: not simply to describe experience but to reach under it, to capture its weight and feel.
To Rest Our Minds and Bodies begins as a shimmering, deeply sincere love story, but curdles into something more upsetting. The object of the narrator’s affection, Luke, is pretty unremarkable. At first, the disconnect between her infatuated perception and the more banal reality is gently comic, even touching; we see what she cannot.
But as her desire intensifies and loses touch with anything mutual or grounded, the novel shifts. What once felt tender becomes claustrophobic. By its final movement, the story has transformed into something closer to psychological horror, a portrait of unrequited love as a kind of entrapment, where emotion becomes a sealed and airless chamber, and the narrator is left utterly alone inside it.
To Rest Our Minds and Bodies is luminous, unsettling and emotionally honest. Armstrong has captured not how things are, but how they feel. In doing so, she has crafted a style that is urgently contemporary and unmistakably her own.
