This blackly comic debut is an astute and funny examination of the pain and pleasure of first love

The heart is a peculiar organ. It wants what it wants, as Emily Dickinson wrote. Especially when you’re young and have no previous experience of love and desire, or the deleterious effects of time on both. This is the core subject of 24-year-old Harriet Armstrong’s debut novel, To Rest Our Minds and Bodies, published by the consistently adventurous independent press Les Fugitives.

When the unnamed narrator, a third-year psychology student, meets fellow student Luke in their campus kitchen, she falls hard. They begin sharing meals and confidences in her room, which bears a “suicide beam” running the length of the ceiling. This memento mori is archly juxtaposed with the narrator’s breathless infatuation, which feels as if “some great transition was occurring inside me, something was aligning, I could actually feel it”. She finds herself “wide open and completely soft like a small trembling animal held in two hands, two hands which could crush it completely but which would not”.