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

'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.'

Tom McCarthy

'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.'

Rupert Thomson

'Lucid and fabulous, and it bites.'

Daisy Hildyard

'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.'

Chris Power

[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

Literary Review

‘Aridjis is a virtuoso of the gorgeously written art novel… A digressive and symbolically rich meditation on the nature of storytelling, sparkling with zany detail’

Daily Mail

'The book has an intense flavour that can only come from an author’s deep investment in their material… Aridjis has a way of telling a story that makes us believe. Even the most unusual details feel emotionally true — and that, surely, is the essence of fiction'

Financial Times

'A mesmerising work, infinitely subtle, elliptical, and spellbinding.'

SAGA Magazine

'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.'

AK Blakemore, the Guardian

'[An] extraordinary novel... Aridjis’s prose, like the magic lantern itself, is hypnotic, transportive'

Andrew Durbin, Frieze

'What marks out Chloe Aridjis as a novelist is her ability to create atmospheres and ambiences...The Shadow of the Object is another quiet triumph for Aridjis'

Spectator