The Boiled in Between is the debut novel by Turner Prize-winning artist Helen Marten, a bold and daring work of fiction which transposes the poetic sensibility of Marten’s visual work to the page. It is a challenging, playful, enigmatic, tactile and deliberately ambiguous work of great inventiveness, which will establish Marten as an exceptional talent and unique voice in contemporary fiction.
The novel began as an attempt to map the structure and stories of a house; within its tilted, sensuous, alchemical world, characters navigate strange, meticulously indexed landscapes – real and conceptual – to question language and definition and illuminate the associative movements of our minds. Spliced between three voices, the narrative is a project always in movement. The characters traverse these in-betweens: the hot-blooded living world; the curious disembodiment of the imagination; and the rampant snipping away at time in a progression morbidly (and comically) ever closer to death.