The Body Builders

Clarke debuts with an alluring fever dream of a novel about a young woman who enters an alternate reality. From a young age, Ada hears voices that tell her about things before they happen, such as her parents’ divorce. Years later, in London, she meets an older American man named Atticus at her apartment building’s pool. Seeing him makes her think she should have been him. After he returns to his family in the U.S., Ada can see and inhabit Atticus’s life when she looks in mirrors, where she sees his face instead of her own. Later, she wakes up in a white room where she meets a man named Don who confirms her suspicion that the voices she hears in her head come from an implant placed at the back of her mouth when she was a child. He offers to switch her body with an “identical synthetic copy” to help her cope with her feelings of dissociation. Ada agrees, and things get even weirder, as when she notices during a swim that she’s leaking saltwater from the back of her head. Clarke grounds the bizarre details and vivid imagery in meticulous prose (“At first she thought the voice had come out of the radio, but then she realized it was inside her head, as if somebody had put it there”). Readers will find much to dissect in this intriguing story of an existential crisis. (Mar.)