T o  R e s t  O u r  M i n d s  A n d  B o d i e s 

Les Fugitives / June 2025

'There is great skill and craft involved in the construction of a voice which feels simultaneously as alive and deliberate as Harriet's does...Harriet is unafraid to look honestly at sex, love and humiliation and consequently has written a book which is somehow both confronting and warm.'  - Rachel Connolly

'Armstrong’s prose has that meticulous and urgent quality reminiscent of Beckett and Duras, achieving the same uncanny shared consciousness...It charts some deep and dark territories we all know but barely acknowledge. It cuts through the platitudes of love and life in a way most writers wouldn’t dare.' - Luke Kennard 

'The rarest debut work... a must read, a new immediate classic, and a heart wrenching work of fiction that for once tells the real truth about being young, ravenous, desperate, too big for the container of the body of youth... This novel is written in gold — every line is marvellous and perfect. I can’t believe this novel exists.' - Luke Goebel

'There is something so beautifully gentle, humane and optimistic about the writing, that is uplifting despite the sadness of the plot. This is ultimately unflinching and brave prose.' - S. J. Naudé 

'A novel of humiliations and revelations where heartbreak gets logged in a spreadsheet. Harriet Armstrong has a singular voice, writing girlhood like a field study — obsessive, precise, and unexpectedly tender.' - Madeline Cash

'An assertive and captivating novel, To Rest Our Minds and Bodies is a poignant portrait of the uncertain state of being alive.' - Rebecca Watson

'A devastating page-turner of an impossible love story, with insight and surprise on every page. Reading this felt like being given pure, clean glasses after wearing really stressfully and depressingly dirty glasses for many years.' - Adelaide Faith

'Harriet Armstrong's To Rest Our Minds and Bodies is an astonishingly poised, absorbing debut...It combines conceptual erudition with an attention to the body, sexuality and the cadences of everyday life in a voice that is both sophisticated and winningly uncynical.' - Alice Blackhurst

German: Luchterhand Literaturverlag / French: Mercure de France / Turkish: Holden Kitap