- Book recommendations
The Shadow of the Object
Written by Chloe Aridjis
- Longlisted
- The Booker Prize 2026
- Published by Chatto & Windus
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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 finds herself in hospital where she undergoes several surgeries 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.
The Shadow of the Object was longlisted for the Booker Prize 2026.
Mysterious and free-wheeling. 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
The Booker Prize 2026 judges
What the judges said
‘Chloe Aridjis’s mysterious and free-wheeling novel begins with an unsettling image: a seemingly disembodied hand, waving in mid-air, which is swiftly bitten by a confused Alsatian. The subsequent story, which follows the jewellery polisher Flora as she recovers from the attack in Mexico City before returning home to London, is similarly rich in strange imagery that slips us between the real world and dream-states. There’s darkened figure in a hospital corridor; figures flickering on a wall; a vignette from the point of view of a mouse. 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.’
What the critics said
Peter Carty, The Spectator Australia
‘What marks out Chloe Aridjis as a novelist is her ability to create atmospheres and ambiences. These often have hints of the uncanny, but rather than making her writing unsettling they give it an appealing intimacy.’
AK Blakemore, the Guardian
‘This is a fabulist’s novel, but one in which any gothic excess is tempered by a profound humanity. Nothing so workaday as a plot could be imputed to this glowing, mythopoeic book. But I can only concur with Aridjis’s many admirers that she is one of the boldest writers at work in English today.’
John Self, Financial Times
‘The story adds resonance through Flora’s sense of connections between the illusory and the tangible, what she calls “the hidden pact between everything”. The Shadow of the Object’s oddness will not appeal to everyone, and not all of it works (such as a section from the viewpoint of Max’s pet mouse). But Aridjis has a way of telling a story that makes us believe. Even the most unusual details feel emotionally true — and that, surely, is the essence of fiction.’
