This Immaculate Body

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Emma van Straaten is a writer of British-Mauritian heritage living in London with her husband and two daughters. Born in Lewisham, she grew up on the Sussex coast, headed north to Durham to study English Literature, and is now happily surrounded by books working at The London Library. In 2021, days after her first child was born, she won the inaugural Discoveries Prize with an early partial draft of This Immaculate Body and has been writing whenever she can, ever since.

Alice has been cleaning Tom's flat every Wednesday for a year. With every smudge wiped from his coffee cup, every multivitamin counted from the jar, every crease smoothed out in his bed, Alice spirals deeper into infatuation. But as Alice prepares for the moment when they will finally meet face-to-face, she discovers that love might not be the cure she thought it was... Told through the eyes of an obsessive protagonist, This Immaculate Body is a literary study of unreliability and unlikability. Exploring alienation and loneliness, class and race, it's a skilled debut with resonance in the way that we view women, mental health and the lost in society.

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