Body Friend Audiobook

Bloomsbury presents Body Friend by Katherine Brabon read by India Dupr

A potent novel about chronic illness and the circular nature of recoveryshortlisted for the major Australian literary award The Stella Prize

In the wake of a major operation a twentyeightyearold woman with chronic illness has twelve weeks to heal or rather to acclimate to her new body and prepare herself to leave the routines comforts and interiority of her convalescence In the hydrotherapy pool she meets Frida a young woman who looks strikingly similar to her and is also in a state of recovery But Frida sees her chronic illness as something to overcome and her body as something to control She adores the pool and pushes the narrator and herself toward an active life relentlessly pursuing the prevailing narrative of illness followed by recovery

But the narrator also happens upon Sylvia another young convalescing woman resting on a bench in a nearby park which the narrator frequents on the days she is too ill to swim Sylvia understands her body and the narrators in a different way gently encouraging her to rest to perceive illness as something happening to her but which does not define her

Throughout the narrators recovery these women shadow overlap mirror and complicate one another and what begins as two seemingly undemanding friendships is challenged by what each woman asks of the narrator of themselves and of their bodies