Helen Marten: The Boiled in Between

‘The Boiled in Between’ is the debut novel by Turner Prize-winning artist Helen Marten, an ambitious literary work full of beauty and sorrow. It is a novel told in the action of persistence and questioning: how the rhythms of a world built upon metaphor and symbolism can collide with relationships personal and domestic.

Spliced between three voices, the narrative is a project always in movement, its characters traversing the in-betweens. The psychic excitements of wind, dust and weather merge with alchemical interior voices, all of them indexes of the universe’s microscopic pornography, a fitful map of language and human systems. Philosophic and tactile, humorous and unrelenting, The Boiled in Between ignites new meaning for people and terms of living that have long ceased to astonish us.