On finishing Harriet Armstrong’s novel, I turned to the author’s bio to confirm a suspicion: that this impressive debut had been written by someone born in the 21st century. To Rest Our Minds and Bodies describes a year in the life of an unnamed student in her last year at university and her romantically charged friendship with an older student, Luke. Its subject might resemble that of many other debut novels, but Armstrong’s book is distinguished by a sophisticated narrative voice, at once lucid and subtly ironic.

Campus novels often satirise academic life – think of the protagonist’s abstruse thesis in Lucky Jim on shipbuilding in the 15th century – but here, the narrator provides a serious study of university life. At the same time, her meditations on Frank O’Hara’s poetry (‘I really admired his nonchalance’), gift economies (‘I felt that one of us had surely misunderstood the concept of the gift completely’) and Foucault’s panopticon display an understated humour. 

She learns about her body as well as her mind, and this education involves a series of baffling and unpleasant sexual encounters with men who are not Luke. Meanwhile, their friendship deepens amid mounting erotic tension. In one virtuoso scene, she and Luke swim in a river and she thinks,