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The Shadow of the Object

Longlisted for the Booker Prize 2026

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The Shadow of the Object

Written by: Chloe Aridjis
Narrated by: Emer Kenny
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**LONGLISTED FOR THE BOOKER PRIZE 2026**

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 our boldest writers' Deborah Levy

‘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

© Chloe Aridjis 2026 (P) Penguin Audio 2026

 Friendship Genre Fiction Literary Fiction Metaphysical & Visionary
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Critic Reviews

'We were charmed by the novel’s meditation on friendship and grief, and its suggestion that the most meaningful truths can be found in the shadows.'
'Chloe Aridjis is a revolutionary who is quietly changing the whole novel form. She is mining the richest seam in the vast field of fiction and coming up with gold. Her radiantly lyrical and intelligent writing is thrilling to read.'
'Clandestine, compassionate, and ever so slightly off-kilter, Chloe Aridjis's magnificent sleight of hand reshuffles the novel and places before us a beautiful and mischievous magic lantern of a book that casts out a multitude of unforgettable scenes, while shining a steady granular light on the hidden depths of the human psyche.'
'The Shadow of the Object would be an immense achievement based on the strange, impressionistic beauty of its prose alone... [a] glowing, mythopoeic book... I can only concur with Aridjis’s many admirers that she is one of the boldest writers at work in English today.'
'In the world The Shadow of the Object brings to light – now sharply focused, now only uncertainly defined – Chloe Aridjis patiently layers signs and symbols into a resonant network. A beautiful, eerie, grief-haunted novel.'
'With The Shadow of the Object Aridjis cements her status as the laureate of the peripatetic — of all that’s serendipitous, strange, improbable and, for these very reasons, true.'
'There is a keen intelligence and an eerie sensuality to everything that Chloe Aridjis writes. Reading The Shadow of the Object is a little like entering a dream state. A subtly addictive and intensely atmospheric experience. You won’t want to wake up.'
'Lucid and fabulous, and it bites.'
'A wildly brilliant and beautifully crafted novel. By turns mesmerising, magical, elegiac and funny, it's utterly compelling, original and surprising. I devoured it.'
[An] enchanting new novel… Aridjis never allows her narrative to become surreal, but revels in the ‘marvellous real’. She creates a world full of wonder without indulging in the impossible
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