by Harriet Armstrong

Publication date: 5 June 2025

In her final year of a degree in psychology, and struggling to relate to the world around her and find her place within it, a young woman drifts from lectures on gifts, vision, the history of global warming, and study groups discussing babies manipulating objects. Yet nothing seems to bring her closer to the great insight she's been promised – except, perhaps, for her budding interest in a fellow student named Luke, a postgraduate in computer sciences, with whom a series of seemingly mundane encounters provides her with a hint of what she might be looking for – a hidden meaning to all that surrounds her. But a chasm between them that grows and shrinks unexpectedly calls into question whether he might be as incomprehensible as the world around her. She yearns, and continues to endeavour to shape her experiences and environment – a Louise Bourgeois exhibition, the underwhelming men she meets on Tinder, a Mitski song, the dreams she has of Luke's ex-girlfriend – she narrates all as she grapples with questions of embodiment and subjectivity.

Set in an unnamed campus in England in the early 2020s, To Rest Our Minds and Bodies queries the nature of one’s experience, mapping the disintegration of a young woman’s sense of self and her struggle to keep a grip on reality. From a voice as unique as it is relatable, and in prose that is keenly observant, delightfully wry, and utterly despairing, the anonymous narrator of this unconventional coming-of-age novel is as brave as she is unforgettable.

‘A work of art. Armstrong’s prose has that meticulous and urgent quality reminiscent of Beckett and Duras, achieving the same uncanny shared consciousness that keeps you hooked from the first sentence. This is – in its absolute specificity of detail, era, and embodiment – a timeless story of love, yearning and despair. It’s rare to read a novel so smart and self-aware which is also so powerfully vulnerable and candid. It charts some deep and dark territories we all know but barely acknowledge. It cuts through the platitudes of love and life in a way most writers wouldn’t dare. In fact I don’t think I’ve ever felt for a character so deeply as the narrator of To Rest Our Minds and Bodies because I don’t think I’ve ever encountered a character so radically and vividly honest.’

—Luke Kennard, author of Notes on the Sonnets

'There is something so beautifully gentle, humane and optimistic about the writing, that is uplifting despite the sadness of the plot. There is a real sense of freedom in the prose – an openness, a plasticity, a suppleness. This is ultimately unflinching and brave prose.' — SJ Naudé, author of The Alphabet of Birds

‘An assertive and captivating novel, To Rest Our Minds and Bodies is a poignant portrait of the uncertain state of being alive.’  
— Rebecca Watson, author of I Will Crash

‘A novel of humiliations and revelations where heartbreak gets logged in a spreadsheet. Harriet Armstrong has a singular voice, writing girlhood like a field study — obsessive, precise, and unexpectedly tender.’
— Madeline Cash, author of Earth Angel

‘To Rest Our Minds and Bodies is the rarest debut: a heart-wrenching literary work that for once tells the real truth about being young, ravenous, desperate, too big for the container of the body.... This novel is written in gold — every line is marvelous and perfect. I can’t believe this novel exists.' 
— Luke B. Goebel, author of Fourteen Stories, None of Them Are Yours

'I truly loved this wonderful, unique book... In a culture of MFA novels which can read like they were all written by the same person, Harriet really has a voice of her own. There is great skill and craft involved in the construction of a voice which feels simultaneously as alive and deliberate as Harriet's does... Harriet is unafraid to look honestly at sex, love and humiliation and consequently has written a book which is somehow both confronting and warm.'
—Rachel Connolly, author of Lazy City

‘A devastating page-turner of an impossible love story, with insight and surprise on every page. Reading this felt like being given pure, clean glasses after wearing really stressfully and depressingly dirty glasses for many years. ’
— Adelaide Faith, author of Happiness Forever

'Harriet Armstrong's To Rest Our Minds and Bodies is an astonishingly poised, absorbing debut. In its account of an unconventional friendship, it combines conceptual erudition with an attention to the body, sexuality and the cadences of everyday life in a voice that is both sophisticated and winningly uncynical. Skewering tropes of the standard coming of age novel, its perspective stands out in its fluid movement between cultural registers and wry take on the gendered politics of form.'
—Alice Blackhurst, author of Luxury, Sensation and the Moving Image

Paperback original with dust jacket
254 pages, 180 x 120 mm
ISBN 978-1-7397783-6-1