The Shadow of the Object by Chloe Aridjis

This is a fabulist novel with a touch of magical realism that was long listed for the Booker Prize in 2026. It opens with a bang. Flora, a fortysomething woman, is visiting her mother and stepfather in Mexico City for the first time in many years when one evening, as she is bidding them goodnight, Diego – the household’s beloved guard dog – springs up and sinks his teeth into her hand. This unexpected incident is an assault not only on Flora’s body, but also upon those delicate fictions that have, until now, shaped her life and swathed that body in an illusory sense of safety. She is then condemned to spend the rest of her vacation confined to the winding corridors of a private hospital in Mexico City, Flora is ambivalent. On the one hand, the environment is hardly stimulating – but on the other, the hospital is life’s waiting room, and it is during a languid midnight stroll of its corridors that she meets Wilhelmina Blau, an elderly yet redoubtable German admitted with a bad case of pneumonia. Flora and Wilhelmina strike up a friendship, and during their nightly meetings in the hospital’s dully lit hallways, Wilhelmina shares the ample wisdoms gleaned from her highly unconventional life, which is not what either Flora or the reader expects. It is a darkly magical tale.