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Summary
Summary
A dark, thrilling new novel from the best-selling author of Longbourn: a work of riveting psychological suspense that grapples with how to live as a woman in the world--or in the pages of a book--when the stakes are dangerously high.
When a young writer accepts a job at a university in the remote English countryside, it's meant to be a fresh start, away from the bustle of London and the scene of a violent assault she is desperate to forget. But despite the distractions of her new life and the demands of single motherhood, her nerves continue to jangle. To make matters worse, a vicious debate about violence against women inflames the tensions and mounting rivalries in her creative-writing class. When a troubled student starts turning in chapters that blur the lines between fiction and reality, the professor recognizes herself as the main character in his book--and he has written her a horrific fate. Will she be able to stop life imitating art before it's too late? At once a breathless cat-and-mouse game and a layered interrogation of the fetishization of the female body, The Body Lies gives us an essential story for our time that will have you checking the locks on your doors.
Author Notes
Jo Baker was born and raised in the village of Arkholme, Lancashire, England. She attended Kirby Lonsdale and Somerville College, Oxford. She later moved to Belfast in 1995 to study for an MA in Irish literature at Queen's University, where she also completed a PhD on the Anglo-Irish novelist Elizabeth Bowen. She is now the author of six novels, including the bestseller, Longbourn.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Still traumatized three years after being assaulted during her pregnancy near her South London home, the unnamed novelist who narrates this lyrical suspense novel from Baker (Longbourn) leaps at the offer of a university lectureship in rural Lancashire, even though it means she and her toddler son will be separated from her husband, who can't leave his teaching job in London. The move will indeed change everything-but hardly the way she hopes. For starters, their rose-covered rented house redefines remote. And then there are the unanticipated challenges presented by her creative writing students-in particular, the most talented but also most troubling one, Nicholas Palmer, whose seemingly autobiographical work in progress centers on a young woman who dies under mysterious circumstances. Though Nicholas starts pushing for an inappropriate personal relationship with the narrator, his writing skill makes her loathe to establish firm boundaries-a decision that backfires catastrophically after a Christmas party. Soon she's fighting to save her job, her marriage, and even her life. All too plausible, Baker's powerful tale is at times heart-rending to read-and impossible to put down. Agent: Clare Alexander, Aitken Alexander Assoc. (June) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
Baker's first novel since A Country Road, a Tree (2016) revolves around the terrifying experience of a professor caught up in a student's dangerous obsession. Three years after a harrowing assault in London leaves the unnamed narrator traumatized, she accepts a position teaching writing at a university deep in the English countryside. Her husband decides to keep his city job and commute to see her and their young son on weekends. At first, she's entranced with the small town, the large house she's renting, and her charming, welcoming colleagues. Her six graduate students appear to be talented and unique, but she can't help but be unsettled by the attention paid her by one of them, Nicholas, a seemingly deeply sensitive young man writing a novel about his dead girlfriend. When their relationship takes a dark turn after a party, the narrator finds herself caught up in a nightmare that threatens her sense of safety, her career, and even her life. With an unflinching eye, Baker deftly explores the pressure, judgment, and dangers women are subjected to on a daily basis simply because they are female. Her brilliant novel is a scathing indictment of the many ways society excoriates women while excusing violent men. A must read.--Kristine Huntley Copyright 2019 Booklist
Guardian Review
Campus novel satire and the high drama of a thriller combine in a fiendishly readable interrogation of the allure of violent fiction Jo Baker's recent books have been metafictions: Longbourn , the story of the servants who are barely mentioned in Pride and Prejudice ; and A Country Road, a Tree , following Samuel Beckett's life in wartime France. Both are brave and clever novels finding new worlds in the shadows of the literary canon. The Body Lies has no obvious specific intertext, but it sits in uneasy, challenging relation to contemporary popular fiction. We begin, conventionally enough, with an invitation to take aesthetic pleasure in the death of a pretty young woman, lying dusted by snow under a beech tree on a moonlit night. Then we turn the page to meet the unnamed narrator, who is heavily pregnant, being assaulted by a strange man outside her London flat. Afterwards, the baby is OK, she says, so she's OK, and though the midwife doesn't believe her, her partner thinks she should "let it go" and move on. And then, 10 pages in, we skip three years and begin again - disturbed, waiting for some explanation - as the narrator starts a new job teaching creative writing in a northern university and caring for her toddler while her partner continues his school-teaching career in London. There is some good campus satire: since one of the writing professors is on research leave and the other off sick with stress, our heroine finds that she is the creative writing department. She must teach students who have requested accommodation for special circumstances while declining to share the nature of the circumstances to be accommodated. She is required to attend induction sessions delivered at the end of the year's teaching, to carry chairs from one decrepit room to another for meetings and to work all night in a hopeless gesture towards increasingly bizarre bureaucratic demands. Meanwhile, back at the remote rural cottage where the narrator and her son are living, three-year-old Sam sees a man watching them in the dusk and the neighbours warn her to get a dog. There is no phone reception. A grieving and confused old woman wanders the lanes and the farmer at the end of the road is hostile: something is wrong, but neither we nor she know what. Now that so many writers teach in universities, it's not surprising to see the writing workshop observed in fiction As writers become - to quote a former university colleague of mine - "the grey squirrels of English departments", it's not surprising that the distinctive dynamics of the writing workshop should find their way into fiction. Baker's version is more direct and plot-driven than Rachel Cusk's in Outline , but both are interested in the drama of fictions and egos performed in weekly ritual. Baker's students include a lawyer writing generic misogynist crime fiction, possibly related to that dead body, with disturbing relish; a young woman mining her own not very interesting past; and a troubled posh boy upsetting everyone by writing rather brilliantly about the workshop. Presenting these pieces in the novel is a loop of metafiction that would floor a less assured writer. The students are all competitive, worried that their tutor is underqualified, that her judgment is unreliable, that she is too old or too young, too posh or too poor, too sexy or not sexy enough, to understand them as deeply as they have paid to be understood. The dynamics of self-revelation, attention-seeking and self-righteousness swirl dangerously, with attractions and repulsions from outside the classroom seeping into the students' writing and reading of each other's work. Several of the male characters think a lot about sexual violence but are also obvious fabulists, so who knows what is true, what is self-delusion, what is said to impress and what is legitimately fictional? Every so often the narrative revisits that dead body, which may be rather close to the narrator's house. When the denouement comes, it is well timed to feel both shocking and inevitable: early enough for satisfying resolution afterwards and late enough to keep the reader up long into the night. There is violence, but there is also a very modern interrogation of violent fiction. What were you staying up late for, exactly? The Body Lies sets itself large challenges: that fragmentary narrative, including an official complaint and some bureaucratic emails; the difficulty of using violence as a narrative device while questioning the politics of using violence as a narrative device; the task of combining the satire of the campus novel with the high drama of the thriller. Baker is a writer who can make it all work. Beyond the dubious fun of the chase, the pleasure of reading this novel is seeing writerly ambition fulfilled.
Kirkus Review
Psychologically as well as physically bruised by a random attack on a city street, a young woman moves to the country with her child only to find that she has not put as much distance between herself and danger as she thought.Haunted by repetitive images of a dying girl in a wood, Baker's (A Country Road, a Tree, 2016, etc.) new novel is a story of female response to male threat, boosted by questions of literary expression. The unnamed heroine, author of a successful first novel and living in London with her teacher husband, is assaulted by a stranger as the story opens. Later, partially healed, she moves north with her 3-year-old son to a university town to take up a lectureship in creative writing. The move is stressful in multiple ways, as the woman juggles domestic responsibilities, struggles to keep her marriage together, and tries, as a novice teacher, to handle her students. The students' written work peppers the tale, notably chapters by Nicholas Palmer, a gifted but complicated young man from a wealthy local family, whose autobiographical fiction includes references to the tragic death of a young girl. The woman begins to sense warning signals yet doesn't take the necessary steps, a factor common to thrillers but also part of Baker's commentary on the difficulties for women of dealing with encroaching peril. Nevertheless, this conventional setup is at odds with Baker's previous, often outstanding body of work, which is marked by more original portraits of women's lives and stances. Here, for all the central character's identifiable dilemmas and the interesting perspective of the "other" literary voices, the story devolves into single-strand plot stereotype, with a psychopath battering down the door and a terrorized woman fleeing for her safety.Baker's fans will enjoy the crisp descriptive writing and insightful nuances but might find this a limited, relatively predictable showcase for her abilities. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
A pregnant young woman falls victim to a quick and brutal assault in London, which eventually leads her to take a job in a more rural area. Her husband stays in the city while she and their three-year-old son move to the countryside, where she teaches creative writing. She is apprehensive and uncertain, as she has had only one book published and feels unqualified and underprepared for the job. Her students are a close-knit group that take to their new instructor, including her in party invites and asking about her son. However, a few of them turn in dark, violent chapters that go beyond fiction and into reality-particularly her reality. VERDICT Longbourn author Baker's foray into suspense contains some beautifully written passages, but it is mostly told from the perspective of the protagonist, and at times it's hard to grasp the young woman's motivations or emotions. Regardless, this book is recommended for readers who enjoy psychological thrillers that focus on women protagonists such as Gillian Flynn's Gone Girl, or Paula Hawkins's Girl on the Train. [See Prepub Alert, 12/6/18.]-Jennifer Funk, McKendree Univ. Lib., Lebanon, IL © Copyright 2019. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Excerpts
Excerpts
Excerpted from The Body Lies The beck is frozen into silence. Snow falls. It muffles the roads, bundles up the houses, deepens the meadows, turns the river black by contrast. It settles along the grey-green twigs and branches of the beech wood, sifts like sugar to the hard earth below--and dusts the young woman curled there, her skin blue-white, dark hair tumbled over her face. She doesn't say a word; she doesn't even shiver now. Her breath comes thinly. A deer, scraping at the snow for roots, stops, and snuffs the air, and scents her, and turns to move silently from the place. Above the canopy, the sky is clear, the moon stands full. An owl scuds across the meadow, drops to kill a vole. In the shadow of the beech tree, there is stillness, not a breath. The body lies. * It was on the busy, dirty Anerley Road in South London that the man hit me. It was the nineteenth of September, it was around quarter past seven in the evening, and I was walking downhill from the train station to our flat after a shift at the bookshop. The weather had been fine in the morning when I set out for work, but now it was raining, and I wasn't dressed for it. I had just crossed the railway bridge when I noticed someone running up the hill towards me. He was wearing black trackies and a blue anorak; he had the hood up, toggle pulled tight against the rain, and was running easily, a steady lope. He said something as he went by. I didn't quite catch it. If I had been at a distance, watching me, rather than being stuck inside my own head, I would have seen the man slow down, come to a halt, and turn, and stare. Then I would have seen him run back down the hill towards me. I'd have seen something like that, anyway. But as it was, I just saw the streaks of streetlamp on the pavement, and felt the hush of cars passing in the rain, and felt the cold damp seeping through my jacket; my hands, in my pockets, rested against the bulge of my belly. I was thinking that my back ached, and that I really needed new shoes and that tomorrow, on my day off, I'd finally screw up courage to phone Mum; if I left it any later it'd be a whole heap of new offence for her to take. I became aware of the sound of running footsteps behind me, and I moved aside, towards the dark trees, to let what I thought was another runner past. But it was the same guy. He ducked in front of me, smiling. He spoke again, and this time I caught what he was saying. He was telling me what he'd like to do to me. I went to dodge past him, but he sidestepped into my path. I backed away, but he came with me; every move was anticipated. And all the time he was talking, his breath on my face. The smell of him. He forced me further back, between the dark trees, up against the wire fence. Then his body was on mine; I could feel his hard-on pushing at my belly. I shoved at him, struggled, but was hamstrung by strangeness: I couldn't process. I thought, I thought, This is really happening . I thought, I should be handling this better . "Get off me." I pushed at him. A hand mauled at my breast. "Fuck's sake, get off me." And then a hand clamped over my mouth. He was telling me what he was going to do to my body, and I thought, There is nothing I can do to stop this . Cars streamed past behind him in the wet; someone walked by on the far side of the street, umbrella tilted in our direction. I was pinned. I couldn't shout. I could hardly breathe. I twisted my head aside, desperate for breath. His hand slipped, and I got my teeth around it. I bit. He swore and jerked away. His weight was off me. He looked at me, shaking out his hand. I staggered to go around him, but he caught me by the shoulder and swung me back. I saw it coming; I just stood there. His fist slammed into my jaw. My head whipped back. My teeth clashed together. I fell back into the branches, the wire fence sinking beneath me. So this is what the world is like. I had no idea. I have a clear image of him standing there, over me, in the light of the streetlamp and in the rain, his blue hood still pulled tight like some kind of hazard gear, like handling me was somehow contaminating but necessary; there was water beading on his face, and he was smiling like he was smiling for a photograph. And he was, I suppose. He must have known it would be indelible, that image; that I would be stuck with it forever. That I'd remember him forever, and I'd always be afraid. Because then he just turned and loped away. I watched till he was over the cusp of the hill, to be certain he had gone. My jaw hurt and when I reached up to touch it there was blood. I straightened out my jacket, smoothed it over my belly. I felt like I'd done something stupid. I made my way back towards the flat. Two huge men were sitting on the front steps of our building, eating fried chicken under the shelter of the doorway. They glanced up at me, then shunted aside to let me pass. * I told Mark what had happened and he hugged me. "Oh my God," he said. He let me go, held me at arm's length and looked long at me. He went pink. "Fuck. Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck." I nodded, eyes full. "What kind of an asshole would do a thing like that?" I didn't have an answer. He touched my belly, looking me in the eyes. "I don't think there's anything wrong," I said. "He only hit me in the face." I went to the bathroom and washed my face and peered down my top at the red marks on my breast. I stuck the split on my chin together with Steri-Strips. Mark brought in a cup of tea and winced again at the sight of my chin. "I mean, Jesus." And he went silent and shook his head. "I'm going to call the police," he said. I blew a breath, still staring at the mirror. He closed the bathroom door; I could hear him in the sitting room, phoning the local station. Mark held my hand. We sat side by side on the sofa. I told the officers what had happened and it felt like we were playing parts, like Mark and I were story of the week in some TV drama; that the police were the regular actors who were there for whole careers. The officers said they'd be in touch, and then they went away. Mark fetched me a blanket and lifted my feet up onto the sofa and brought me tea and toast, and then he rang our midwife. She called by late that evening, at the end of her rounds. She took a squint at my Steri-Strips and said I'd done a decent job of it. Then she had me lie down and bare my belly and the three of us listened to the baby's squelch and squish heartbeat on her little monitor. She smiled at me over my bulge and I smiled unevenly back at her. "What about you, though, hon?" she asked. "How are you?" "So long as the baby's okay," I said, "I'm okay." She said, "You know, women say that all the time. But I don't always believe them." * I didn't get around to calling Mum. Not that day, nor the next. Good news is one thing to spread around; bad news, though, I screw the lid down tight and nothing gets out. Mark was reluctant to go to work, but I said not to worry, I'd be fine. I'd have to be fine eventually and I might as well start now. He said he'd skip out directly after school, get someone else to cover Homework Club; he'd be home by five. It was my day off, which struck me as a bit of a waste, but at least I didn't have to call Sinead and explain why I wasn't coming in. I tried to fill the time. I tried to write but I couldn't. I tried to read but I couldn't. I wanted an apple, but there were no apples in the flat, so I went out to buy some. I got as far as the front door of the building. Someone skimmed past on a bike; cars hurtled by; a loud tangle of lads came jostling down the pavement. I closed the door and went back up the stairs to our flat and locked the door. I texted Mark. Mark came home just after five with a bag of Granny Smiths. He also brought a stack of work with him. He said he'd had to tell Amy what had happened; he hoped I didn't mind. He couldn't dump Homework Club on her without some kind of explanation. She sent her love, and hoped I was feeling better soon. "That's nice," I said. But I didn't like that Amy knew. It hurt to eat apples: it made the cut on my chin weep. Over the coming days, the bruise faded, the cut healed, and I managed to leave the flat. I made it into work. I started getting the bus to and from the station, rather than walk. I was okay, I thought. I was getting over it. It could have been so much worse. I received a quiet kind letter from Victim Support. They offered emotional and practical help; all I had to do was make myself an appointment. I left the letter on the kitchen counter with the reminder for the gas bill, and the council tax statement, and the club card vouchers. I met up with Dad. He bought me lunch at Brown & Green. I didn't have to tell him about the baby; I just waddled in and his eyes lit on my belly and then up to meet mine, and then just, whumpf , they filled up. He was on his feet and pushing past the table and hugged me. I'd waited till the bruise had faded; he didn't notice the scar. It's on the underside of my chin and you'd have to know it was there to see it. We talked and talked and he promised that he would talk to Mum too; he was sure that she'd come around. Two days later there was a card in the post-- Congratulations! , a picture of a big-eyed teddy bear in dungarees holding a bunch of balloons--and a cheque for a hundred pounds. Buy yourself something nice , he wrote in the card; he'd signed it from Mum and Dad . So she hadn't come around after all. I bought groceries. I made an appointment with the dentist: while I was pregnant treatment was free. I told her I'd chipped my tooth falling off my bike. She wanted to know what I was doing, riding a bike in London, in my condition? Or indeed at all, ever? And more importantly did I carry an organ donor card? Because anything else was a waste of good fresh kidneys. She peered into my mouth and decided there wasn't any point trying to repair the tooth. I'd stop noticing it, she said, in time. * I said to Mark one evening, "I wonder what is going on in someone's life, that they feel the need to do a thing like that." He looked up from his book. "Is this about that guy?" "I mean, maybe if I hadn't bitten him. Violence begets violence, doesn't it. Maybe he wouldn't have punched me." "Don't do that, don't blame yourself. Jesus." "I'm just trying to understand." He hesitated, then he said, "You need to let it go, love." I chewed my lip. "It's not doing you any good, brooding on it like this." He leaned over to stroke my arm. "You have to let it go. You can't let it change your life." The following day, I saw Blue Anorak Man in the street. He shot past on a bike while I was waiting for the bus. I think it was him. I managed to get on board and sit down. I couldn't stop shaking. The bus pulled away. We ground our way uphill, in the opposite direction, and I realised that whilst he was fixed like a photograph in my mind, he might not even recognise me. A few weeks after that, the bus didn't come, and didn't come and I had to walk. Heading downhill towards Thicket Road, someone came running up behind me. I froze, waiting for the crash of him back into me. But nothing happened. A woman ran past in black-and-pink leggings and pink vest top. She jogged on down the street, bouncing ponytail, swinging elbows. I felt a rush of love for her, for her just running by without a backwards glance. But I was still shaking when I got back to the flat. And then the baby was born. My little boy. Samuel. Sammy. Sam. He was squashed and purple and skinny and his two-weeks-overdue arrival nearly did for both of us. After a shaky start, he just got on with the business of being a baby and became more beautiful and funny every day. Excerpted from The Body Lies: A Novel by Jo Baker All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
