by Harriet Armstrong

Publication date: 15 April 2025

A young woman reckons with a romantic obsession in this mesmerising debut campus novel which confronts thorny gender relations, contradictory desires, consent, and unravelling mental health within Gen Z.

What does it mean to be a person? In her final year of university, our narrator is struggling to relate to the world around her and find her place within it. Drifting from lectures on gifts, vision, the history of global warming to Louise Bourgeois exhibitions to study groups discussing babies manipulating objects, she finds nothing to further her search for the great revelation she has been promised – except, perhaps, for her budding interest in a fellow student named Luke. Will this relationship bring the understanding of reality she is yearning for, or will Luke turn out to be just as incomprehensible as everything else?

A debut novel from a voice as unique as it is relatable, 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 engagement with the physical world, in prose that is keenly observant, delightfully wry, and utterly despairing. An anti- Bildungsroman for the pandemic generation.

See Paul Fulcher's five-star review on Goodreads.

‘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

'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

'Harriet Armstrong's To Rest Our Minds and Bodies is an astonishingly poised, absorbing debut. In its account of an unconventional friendship between a sociology undergraduate and a computer sciences postgraduate, 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

'The book describes brilliantly that in-between nature of university life. A striking work and recommended.'
— Paul Fulcher

Paperback original with endpapers
250 pages, 180 x 120 mm
ISBN 978-1-7397783-6-1

Paperback original with endpapers
250 pages, 180 x 120 mm
ISBN 978-1-7397783-5-4