To Rest Our Minds & Bodies is a beautiful, upsetting, serious novel, yet also seriously funny… warm and engaging, emotional and articulate, witty and funny, and very, very, bleakly, real…. A complex portrait of obsession, but alsoof misjudgement… Armstrong depicts an obsessive personality whose obsession is stoked by the minor attentions of a minor person who is mostly well-behaved and well-intentioned only because they’re not interesting enough to be cruel… Is the avoidance of cruelty a strength? Is failing to reject (to clearly and firmly push away) an obsessee as much of a taking advantage as fucking them (which they want) would be? A dark, serious, engaging and important novel about youth and growing up… A haunting, echoing novel [about] the horrors of performed socialising and the social expectations of desire and sexual response… The need to be loved and to love… The wish to understandand to be understood… The crack crack crack of loneliness and confusion that life is filled with… Thoughts of hope and desire and wishfulness and regret andconfusion and aloneness and optimism and despair and and and and andeverything, really. It’s my kinda book. Maybe it isn’t yours. But I fucking liked it alot a lot a lot…’ — Scott Manley Hadley, Triumph of the Now

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