Kintsugi is the Japanese art of repairing broken ceramics with liquid gold, to highlight and celebrate an object’s past. In this powerful and personal novella, Senka Marić uses the concept of kintsugi to interrogate ideas of illness, survival and recovery.

Two months after her husband packs his bags and leaves the family home, the narrator finds a lump in her armpit. It’s a discovery she’s been dreading ever since her mother’s breast cancer diagnosis sixteen years earlier, and one that will change her body forever. Through diagnosis, chemotherapy, and surgery, the narrator returns to those moments of her girlhood when she learnt to be ashamed of her sexuality and estranged from her body – the same body that now threatens to fall apart during her illness. Laced with a drive for life, sensuality and pleasure, Body Kintsugi is an intimate and optimistic book about a woman’s relationship with her body as it breaks and is put back together.

Senka Marić was born in southern Bosnia and Herzegovina in 1972. She is a writer, poet and editor and is the author of three poetry collections and two novels: Body Kintsugi (2018), and Gravities (2021). Body Kintsugi was awarded the prestigious Meša Selimović Prize for the best novel published in 2018 in the region of Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Serbia and Montenegro. It is her first book to be translated into English.

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Cover image shows a collage made up of fragments of a photo showing a woman's body
Title: Body Kintsugi
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