The Body Builders

by Albertine Clarke

Ada lives a solitary life in London. A young adult haunted by her lonely childhood, she spends her days swimming, occasionally visiting her cousin, meeting people for drinks, ignoring invitations.

When she meets a man named Atticus by the pool, Ada immediately senses an intimate connection between them, as if they share a life in a way she can't explain. Little by little, Ada's estrangement from all that is familiar to her widens, as though she is seeing her reflection through a mirror, pieces of it falling away. She worries she may be losing her mind.

Eventually, Ada's attachment to the world and her body itself fails completely. She is jolted into a new, artificial environment - The Facility - apparently created and designed just for her.

When a person's life is inherently one of isolation, are our connections with those around us merely projections of ourselves? And if not, where do they come from?

With precision, subtlety, and confidence Albertine Clarke transforms the speculative into an entirely singular experience of deep interiority. The Body Builders lands like a blow, widening a crack that allows us to perceive the world differently than we ever imagined.

Genres: Fiction, Literary Fiction, Literature, Audiobook, Speculative Fiction, Science Fiction, Surreal

240 pages, Kindle Edition

First published March 3, 2026

About the author

Albertine Clarke received an MFA in fiction from the University of Florida and studied English Literature at the University of Edinburgh where she won the Lewis Edwards Memorial prize for creative writing. Raised in London, she now lives in Brooklyn, NY.

Reviews

[Jan Agaton · Rating 3 out of 5]

Sally rooney x black mirror = weird girl fever dream with themes of loneliness and desire to belong/be loved

[jocelyn • coolgalreading]

i genuinely don't know what to make of this, but ty to the publisher for the gifted copy!

[Marcus (Lit_Laugh_Luv)]

I'm simple: I see a blurb by Katie Kitamura, I read the book. Thank you to Bloomsbury for the gifted copy <3

Substack | Bookstagram | BookTok | BookTube | Bookshop.org Store | Libro.fm Bonus Offer

[Morgan · Rating 2 out of 5]

2.5

not! good!

[Jasey Roberts · Rating 5 out of 5]

Albertine Clarke’s debut is one of those great, mind-altering novels: I read the first half on a flight home, and when the plane landed it seemed like I’d been bottled into a world that obeyed the rules of Ada’s life more than my own. The book sort of infests your mind like that, which is an experience I treasure!
Go Body Builders 🤖🦾🦿

[Sam · Rating 3 out of 5]

2.5 stars. Not really Sheila Heti x Megan Nolan, as advertised, rather Sally Rooney x Severance. And unfortunately it fell flat

[JASARA HINES · Rating 2 out of 5]

I honestly don't get this book. Maybe if it was not so cerebral I may have gotten the message out of it. Ultimately, I understand that this book is about family and not feeling like you belong. Not feeling like you are loved but actually having love and not seeing it as love. I think this is what that book is about. It was so weird and there was this weird motif of bodybuilding. So the main character's father is a bodybuilder. He wants her to be into it. He leaves his job full time to focus on bodybuilding. Then there's that other element of the "them" whoever they are, who build bodies. They build "replacements" and Ada is one. Then Ada also "builds" bodies. When she thinks of a person they materialize. Also, when you are a mother, you build a body, you build love , you build family, and Ada's mom dies this, but it's ultimately broken. And this Ada feels like she isn't a real person. She's not real. She's the replacement body. Weird book about trauma I guess....

[jordan]

I need to sit with this one for a bit…there IS some weird shit in here, absolutely. If you’re looking for weird, plus a cool and unique cadence to the writing style, you’ll certainly find it with the body builders.

[William · Rating 4 out of 5]

What a strange little narrative. It reminded me of Maya Binyam's Hangman (recency comparison on my part) but sci-fi (this book is not sci-fi). Often, when I read contemporary texts like these, texts where our speaker is aloof, unmoored, searching for meaning (whether they know it or not), I get a sense of laziness from the writing, a desire to make things as you go and not worry so much about plot (I said what I said!).
This is not that book. You don't come here for plot, but this book does have a restrained tightness in its description and detail that has it reading, on many pages, like a prose poem. I think the section breaks were masterful and the ending was as imbalancing to the reader as it was cathartic for the speaker (Ada).

"I like it," he said. "It was funny. I wish I could write something funny."

"I think most funny writing isn't intentional," she said. He smiled without looking at her.

"Not like funny people," he said.

[Remi]

i think i'll be sent into some philosophical spiral after reading this

[Hailey Hinojosa · Rating 5 out of 5]

Its hard to put my feelings about this book into words. It is surreal and deeply personal. I think it explains the feeling of depersonalization and mental illness in such a realistic way. My favorite line from the book is "I was just a pair of eyes." It it all of the worst parts of mental illness shoved into a person, the struggle with parents, struggle with friends, feeling unsure. Ada is a deeply selfish character in a way that feels relatable and personal and I understand her in ways I would rather not. Overall though it was a lovely book, I love discomforting books. It makes you think, and requires an open mind. It is open to personal interpretation and is a very open-ended book.

[julian :) · Rating 4 out of 5]

very very strange. this is such a lonely book. i don’t know why it worked for me but it definitely did.

[Abrisham · Rating 5 out of 5]

A gorgeously terrifying read. I enjoyed the absurd and questioned everything. Ada feels like an old friend and I ate this book up.

[Adri · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.25 Stars

[claudia r · Rating 5 out of 5]

this book is mysterious and genuinely haunting and also profoundly moving… contemporary fiction rare combo… 5 star

[Megan MacGillivray · Rating 5 out of 5]

weird and wonderful!

[John Caleb Grenn · Rating 3 out of 5]

THE BODY BUILDERS
Albertine Clarke
Thank you for the gifted copies (ARC and ALC) to @bloomsburybooksus and @librofm. You can tell I read this book on audio by how I put my earbuds next to the book. 😎😎😎😎😎😎😎😎😎😎😎

Anyway. Just zoned out. What? Who? Where am I again? What is this. What’s happening. Who are these people? am I even real, and does it even matter, honestly why I am I thinking about this at all?

If you’ve felt like that, or feel that way literally right now, you might be into The Body Builders.

Clarke has a unique style, a simple brushstroke with her prose that really does a wonderful job building a structured story up behind a hazy, confusing exterior. What I mean is, you get to feel as confused sometimes as the narrator, which is just very difficult to pull off in a novel, but here it’s done with grace.

Ada, the confused narrator, is typically alone but falls in love with Atticus. Love at first sight: an out of body experience for many, no? Well. Here’s the novel that takes both of those well-known phrases and tells you just why that may be the case—or why it is for Ada at least.

What’s fun about this book is that you can take it all at face value and have a good time, or you can look at this book from the side a little and see a different sort of thing happening to a modern woman, to a brain stuck in a body stuck in a world with this bizarre, unasked-for, terrifically untrustworthy consciousness.

If I may: start this one expecting to use a bit of discernment. Don’t walk here lightly. This is very creative, a bit complex, but in the end a pretty fresh book. No doubt when I hear of Clarke’s next novel headed our way, I will be gladly checking it out.

[Mia Moore · Rating 3 out of 5]

I kept trying to make sense of it and think I got halfway there. Lost interest towards the end - think it might have gone down the same path too long.

[Yahaira · Rating 4 out of 5]

What if the most alien landscape you could ever explore was inside your own mind?

My journey reading this book: Oh this reminds me of Marie-Helene Bertino. Wait, are we going the Kurt Vonnegut route? OK, I’m getting Pip Adam vibes. That is to say, this is a very me-book: tender while being almost suffocatingly interior with a touch of weird.

The Body Builders follows Ada, a solitary but extremely perceptive woman reeling from her parents' divorce, who is unexpectedly jolted from her physical reality into a mysterious, artificial environment known as The Facility. Within this sterile, surreal space, she must navigate the surreal borders between her mind and body to confront her profound isolation and the painful legacy of parental rejection.

Clarke weaves a speculative universe from the quiet, devastating ache of profound loneliness. I’ve seen some reviews mentioning Atticus, whom she meets at the start of the novel, but I don’t care about that man because at its core, this is a novel about a deeply complicated mother-daughter relationship and the agonizing fallout of maternal rejection.

More than anything, Ada is driven by a desperate longing to be truly seen, acknowledged, and loved by her parents. When that fundamental connection is missing, the resulting alienation is palpable. Clarke physicalizes this emotional dissociation using speculative elements. Instead of framing lucid dreaming as a whimsical, boundless playground, Clarke constructs Ada's self-directed dream space as a sterile, almost alien lab (honestly, it felt like the most lonely hotel that is just one long liminal space).

What I love about spec fic is that you can just accept that Ada was in The Facility for a while, or you can see it as an unsettling metaphor for Ada’s extreme dissociation. It’s funny how it’s always aliens when our brains can’t deal with what we’re emotionally or physically experiencing.

By literalizing the architecture of a fractured psyche, The Body Builders captures the chilling sensation of being a stranger in your own body and your own family. I found this to be a deeply resonant exploration of how we try to build ourselves back up when the foundation of parental love is absent.

[Rob Boylan · Rating 3 out of 5]

Have you ever looked at your parents and thought, “there's no way I came from them. Just no way in hell”? Sure you have. Surely everyone has. So…. What if it was true?

This is the problem facing Ada. Only she doesn't quite know it at the start. She only knows that something is off, about her, or everyone else in London, or maybe the entire world. Something is not adding up.

There is a bit of a slow burn quality to the book, which doesn't take shape until about page 75 -- it flirts with several plots and themes, potential directions are meandered towards and retreated from -- then fills out rapidly as, oddly enough, Ada sinks into the deepest pit of depression.

One of these flirtations is with an older man, Atticus, who she meets at the pool in her building and shares a strange, rather unnatural connection with: she can see his thoughts. More than that, she can see through his eyes at times. Because of this, she knows that Atticus is thinking of her. Constantly.

As Ada sinks deeper, another unnatural thing occurs. She finds herself in a blank room with a man in a lab coat who says she's been monitored her whole life, and they would like to replace her body with a synthetic one to fix some issues that have cropped up lately. They think it will help.

“Issues”? And “they”? “They” who??

The Body Builders is the softest of soft sci-fi, the kind with almost no relation to actual hypothesised-and-verified science, which I mean in the best possible way. That is, personally speaking, the best sci-fi -- the stuff dreams are made of, if I can quote The Maltese Falcon. It's in this unreality sandbox where the book shines, letting Ada explore this odd little blank, synthetic world, seeing how her own mind works in the process. It's a lonely world though: it's not hers, and she needs to get back.

Conversely, the Ada of real life isn't much fun. Her parents aren't much fun. Depression isn't much fun. Is there anything to get back to? Well, even if it isn't the best, what's yours is still yours and you'll always want it back.

[Graeme Williams · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Body Builders by Albertine Clarke is a psychologically charged, surreal debut that blends literary fiction with speculative elements to explore the unstable boundaries between body, identity, and perception.

At its center is Ada, a detached and observant protagonist whose life unfolds in quiet isolation, shaped by emotional distance from her surroundings and fractured relationships with family, particularly her father’s transformation into a bodybuilding obsession. Clarke uses this family dynamic as an early signal of the novel’s larger preoccupation: the body as both object and estrangement, something simultaneously intimate and unknowable.

The narrative gradually shifts from grounded realism into increasingly surreal and speculative terrain as Ada’s sense of reality begins to fracture. Encounters, relationships, and environments take on a dreamlike instability, suggesting that external reality may be inseparable from internal projection. The novel resists clear boundaries between what is experienced and what is constructed, instead positioning perception itself as the central site of tension.

Clarke’s prose is precise and controlled, allowing subtle distortions in Ada’s world to accumulate rather than announce themselves. This creates a slow, disquieting unraveling effect, where meaning is constantly deferred and reinterpreted. The influence of psychological and philosophical science fiction is evident, but the execution remains firmly literary in tone and structure.

As the story expands into more explicitly speculative territory, it deepens its inquiry into embodiment, isolation, and the limits of human connection. The result is a narrative that is less concerned with plot resolution and more invested in destabilizing certainty about selfhood and reality.

The Body Builders stands as an ambitious and conceptually rich debut, particularly suited to readers of literary speculative fiction who appreciate introspective, unsettling narratives that blur the line between psychological realism and surreal transformation.

[Rachel Louise Atkin · Rating 2 out of 5]

I'm not quite sure how to interpret this novel but I'm going towards the idea of reading this as a novel about someone who is going through quite a severe psychotic breakdown. A young women who has an estranged father and a bad relationship with her mother begins to think her own existence is fabricated and she soon starts to have visions of a strange doctor telling her about an alien experiment. She finds herself in a 'facility' which she can control with her mind until she decides to return home and repair her relationships.

The narrative wasn't super compelling after the first half and I found the lack of plot/depth of characters to be the downfall as it lost my interest quite quickly. There was some good imagery in here but I found there was a lack of anything to latch on to in terms of anything to keep me reading. There were a couple of moments I did really enjoy and it is a very unique premise, but I don't think it worked especially well without some sort of deeper plot line or more engaging threads running through-out.

If you take this literally it can be read as a strange sci-fi novel but I don't think this really worked either as like I said above there is no real plot or expansion of ideas. I saw the 'facility' more as a symbol of a mental health ward rather than anything literal and I found the ideas of science fiction more powerful as an exploration of psychosis.

A strange book that I wouldn't recommend massively but has some great imagery and writing.

[Lillian · Rating 3 out of 5]

Albertine Clarke’s hypnotic debut novel centers on Ada, a troubled young woman from a fractured family. Her father’s interest in working out at the gym supersedes any parental responsibility or romantic attachment to her mother and they ultimately divorce. Ada is left living a solitary life in her London apartment with only a cousin for occasional social outings. One day she meets a man named Atticus by the pool at her apartment with whom she feels an instantaneous bond. This connection leads Ada into a surreal world of discovery she was not quite prepared for. A world that she had glimpses of as a child but begins to manifest more extensively as she becomes an adult
In this deeply introspective novel Clarke takes us through Ada’s process of self awareness and self understanding with dreamlike intensity. Constantly having access to Ada’s internal thoughts is strangely not oppressive but rather intriguing as we follow the journey toward self knowledge of her body.
Indeed, the reader comes to learn that Clarke’s title has more than one meaning.

[The Michelleing Of Monte Cassino · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5⭐️

Clarke is having fun with double meanings and you really need to read this book twice to see it. That I liked.

You can look at this novel as an adult daughter failing to handle her parent’s divorce and so separates herself from it. Literally. You can view it as a Severance style sci-fi. You can even view it as a Borges’s style surrealism piece. But in all aspects I felt let down. It didn’t get weird enough.

Ada our isolated FMC can only imagine shibboleths and simulacrums of herself along the gender binary? Just like she can only imagine dream tigers and strange submissive polish men’s cell phone numbers on the backs of her imagined snickers bars?

To twist a bit from The House of Asterion:

‘Would you believe it, Ariadne?’ Said Theseus. ‘The girl from Norwich scarcely abstracted herself…’

All that is to say is when you invoke Borges (whose stories are a beautiful pleasure of mine) as a marketing point, I go in expecting weirder. Or at least more fun loving with the prose. All this made me wonder was why the British don’t go to therapy.

[Sam Hughes · Rating 4 out of 5]

Shew. That was something. If you're interested in an out-of-body (literally) fever dream experience, look no further than The Body Builders by Albertine Clarke. I am so thankful to Bloomsbury US and Netgalley for advanced access before March 3, 2026.

Ada has never felt like she belonged. What's more, everyone in her life has never felt a connection deep enough worth mentioning... that is, until she meets Atticus in her apartment building's natatorium, and it's like she understands his entire existence, yet he's a complete stranger. This random meeting unveils a long history of uncanny experiences that usher Ada directly into a rabbit hole of mania and imposter syndrome, not too metaphorically.

Out-of-body experience is the theme here, yall.

Note: I was so captivated by the madness, and could get lost in Albertine Clarke's prose, for I too felt as though I was catapulted into Ada's mania, seeking refuge in insanity. bravo.

[happiesque · Rating 5 out of 5]

Unfortunately, to say the exact ways in which I found myself reflected in this book would spoil the end point of a journey that would be best experienced for oneself, so I will be brief. Feelings of inadequacy, listlessness, confusion about life and people and one's place in the world; Clarke may not present a solution for it all (this is, after all, not a self-help book), but she offers an uncanny portrait, and then invites us to explore it through Ada's oftentimes trippy, oftentimes awkward, always uncomfortable journey through her mental health and relationships. And, hurrah, no therapy speak! Only her experiences laid out for us to examine and understand (or misunderstand) as we see fit.

[cass krug · Rating 3 out of 5]

mixed feelings on this one. i enjoyed the straightforward prose despite the confusion at the heart of the book’s plot.

i think the concept had so much potential, but the execution felt disjointed to me. the plot line with atticus, the stranger that our main character feels an inexplicable connection to, gets lost as the novel turns into a surreal fever dream of surveillance and imagination. there's also a lot of familial tension that seemed to fall to the wayside. i wish there was a stronger thread connecting the different pieces of the puzzle.

thank you to bloomsbury and netgalley for the digital copy, publishes march 3!

[Tamara · Rating 3 out of 5]

Reading this book is an experience that is hard to shake off. A speculative fiction book with very straightforward, even somewhat sterile writing but nonetheless very captivating nature. It cast a spell on me, I kept turning pages. It is a surreal, fever-dreamlike reading experience, where the line between real and imagined is forever blurred.

I found it interesting how this book looks at the divorce and its impact on the adult daughter, and definitely appreciated the clever “body building” reference. The body-mind discourse was thought-provoking.

Read this if you are craving an out of body reading experience. Very niche read.

[Ellen Ross · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book was very addicting. Ada is a relatable character for me personally. The connection between her and Atticus was so well written out it had me hooked. The theme of isolation was fascinating in this book’s plot and it really got me thinking of how we perceive things in life. I don’t always feel like I learn life lessons from books but this one really opened my eyes. The characters were so well developed and the plot was easy for me to follow. This is another must read! I received an advance review copy for free, and I am leaving this review voluntarily.

[taketwolu]

Ada, who has lived a lonely life and is dealing with her parent’s divorce, finds her world starting to change after she meets a man named Atticus at the pool. She soon finds herself in an artificial environment called The Facility where she starts to question reality. This speculative fiction had me confused and questioning reality while also exploring Ada’s relationship with her parents and loneliness. Through fragments, Ada pieces herself together. Overall, a very surreal, trippy read.

Thanks Bloomsbury Books US and Libro.FM for the arc!