Formats: paperback, ebook | Cover design: Esther Clayton | ISBN (ebook): 9781915691057 | Pages: 192 | Published: 11 May 2023

About the Book

A girl suffering a bizarre menstrual aberration is exploited by those around her, including her father. A boy expresses his love for a nonhuman man by making himself animalistic. A girl abandoned by her community discovers the possibility of transmutation through cannibalism. A man struggles with his wife’s choices around her existence, and considers whether he should leave her alone in her semi-oblivion, or join her.

In This Is My Body, Given For You, Heather Parry places in our hands fifteen stories in which the body is something that can be changed, altered, and escaped from. With dripping blood, bruised tentacles, and seamed skin, Heather Parry’s debut short story collection will consume you.

About the Author

Heather Parry was born in Rotherham and lives in Glasgow. She has won the Bridge Award for an Emerging Writer, Cove Park's Emerging Writer Residency and the Laxfield Literary Launch Prize. In 2021 she was a Hawthornden Fellow and her first novel, Orpheus Builds a Girl, was released in 2022. 

Praise for This Is My Body, Given For You

“A spectral succession of mal-formed and grotesque vignettes that one cannot help but delve into to discover the little black hearts imbued in each. I was allured and delighted in equal measures.”
Matt Wesolowski, author of the Six Stories series

“Heather Parry is one of my favourite writers. These stories are strange, bold, queer and surprising – all my favourite things. A stunning debut collection.”
Kirsty Logan, author of Now She Is Witch and Things We Say in the Dark

“A remarkable collection that shines a harsh light on the dark underbelly of humans and humanity, with an occasional flash of slyly absurd humour. Shocking, visceral, intimate and honest, and genuinely disturbing and outrageous in its horrific detail. There’s a dark mind at work here.”
Lucie McKnight Hardy, author of Dead Relatives and Water Shall Refuse Them

“No one knows how to twist the body quite like Heather Parry. Through mistaken menses stigmata, to sentient sex dolls who collect the muttered moans of male clients, the stories in This is My Body, Given For You breach the boundaries of the skin with sparkling prose. In some circles of fiction it's taught that the body is the place where all stories begin--Parry brings this home in the most macabre and dazzling way.”
Elle Nash, author of Nudes and Animals Eat Each Other

“Bodies, blood and bestial urges: this feral collection may be spattered with bodily fluids, but it’s smart as hell. The next time I go on holiday, I’d like to travel through the macabre landscape of Heather Parry’s mind. Until that’s possible, This Is My Body, Given For You is surely the next best thing.”
Alice Slater, author of Death of A Bookseller

“In This is My Body, Given for You, Parry has created a clawed offering that plunges deep down to plumb the bones and viscera to find revelation there. Precise and beguiling, the stories in this collection will thrill and sicken; test, stretch, shift boundaries and reveal anew the divine in the puddling, stinking, expansive human flesh.”
Helen McClory, author of On the Edges of Vision and Mayhem & Death

“A relentless expedition into the queer, uncanny lands of the body, written with a wry yet scalpel-like precision. Leaves you split open and dazed.”
Anahit Behrooz, author of BFFs

“Heather Parry once again proves she is one of the most daring and exciting writers in the UK. This book is a delectable brew which leaves the reader filled with beautiful prose and deep musings on what it means to be human.”
Camilla Grudova, author of The Doll’s Alphabet