For readers of Ling Ma and Sayaka Murata, Hon Lai Chu’s dystopian exploration of body autonomy, relationships, and late capitalism defies and then reassembles dark realities.
In a failing city, a government program incentivizes couples to “conjoin”—surgically attach themselves to one another—promising a flourishing economy, ecological revitalization, and personal fulfillment. A student writing her dissertation on the program’s history begins to suffer from insomnia. As her world unravels and under the weight of expectations by both society and her close friends, she worries that maybe they are all right when they tell her it would be better—for the good of another person and for the good of the country—to sacrifice everything that she is and get conjoined. Mending Bodies blends body horror and political allegory to explore a world where even the motives of those you love most are shaped by larger forces.
A Paris Review and Words Without Borders Favorite Book of 2025
Winner of PEN Presents by the English PEN, 2023
“An unsettling fable about an extreme form of cohabitation. . . . Hon’s turns of phrase are consistently arresting (“The self proliferates as incessantly as mold”). This intelligent speculative work is eerily transfixing.”—Publishers Weekly
“This is a deeply visceral book—it has to be—but there’s no shortage of big ideas here, from attempts to reckon with loneliness to notions of governmental overreach. . . . Throw in a powerful ending and you have a work of fiction that would make a great double bill with Brian Evenson’s Last Days.”—Words Without Borders
“Hon Lai Chu’s Mending Bodies is a surreal tale set in a dystopian city that may or may not be Hong Kong, in which married couples are not just legally bound but surgically attached to each other. . . . Hon’s language, vividly translated by Jacqueline Leung, has a pleasing sharpness and bite.”—The Paris Review
“In the spirit of Orwell and Atwood, but with a distinctly Hong Kong sensibility, the narrative explores how conformity can be achieved not through force but through carefully cultivated desire. . . . Hon Lai Chu writes with surgical precision. Her prose, rendered beautifully by Leung, moves between clinical detachment and visceral anguish. . . . Mending Bodies joins a growing canon of sinophone dystopias that use allegory to navigate the unspeakable.”—World Literature Today
“Hon Lai Chu blurs nightmare and reality in this allegorical story about the body, identity and social controls, and her nameless menacing world is [brought] to life in a haunting translation by Jacqueline Leung.”—English PEN