The Shadow of the Object

by Chloe Aridjis

'One of our boldest writers' Deborah Levy

A magnificent work of shadow-play and a meditation on desire, metamorphosis and mortality.


Flora is visiting home in Mexico when the family dog leaps up and bites her hand. She winds up in hospital where she undergoes several surgeries under anaesthesia and meets Wilhelmina, an elderly German woman with pneumonia, who collects pre-cinema toys and instruments. The two of them embark on a series of dream-like conversations in the hospital corridors. Wilhelmina puts on a magic lantern show for Flora, leaving her spellbound.

When things take an unexpected turn, Flora finds herself entrusted with an important mission. She returns to London, where she resumes her job polishing silver at a jewellery shop, and strikes up a strange friendship with Wilhelmina’s son, Max. As Flora dips in and out of her imagination, she is increasingly aware it’s not only the magic lantern that projects, and her perception of reality is subtly altered.

‘One of the most brilliant novelists working in English today’ Garth Greenwell

‘The politics of her prose is existential rather than anecdotal, as it was with Kafka’s’ Zadie Smith

‘A subtle and courageous writer’ Ali Smith

‘Chloe Aridjis is crafting a poetics of the strange’ TLS

Kindle Edition

Expected publication April 16, 2026

About the author

Chloe Aridjis was born in New York and grew up in the Netherlands and Mexico City. After receiving a BA from Harvard, she went on to receive a PhD from Oxford University. A collection of essays on Magic and Poetry in Nineteenth-century France was released in 2005. Her first novel, Book of Clouds, followed in 2009, winning the Prix du Premier Roman Etranger in France.