LoveReading Says
LoveReading Says
Told in three parts, Anna Metcalfe’s Chrysalis is hands-down exceptional. Shot-through with unnerving elements of mystery, this masterwork of incisive, psychologically profound storytelling unveils a young woman’s transformation from the perspectives of three people who long to be close to her. Three people whose lives and outlooks are changed irrevocably by her, leaving them feeling husk-like and overawed in her wake. In the words of her mother: “She has a power over the people who find her; once you’ve known her, it’s hard to go back to a time before”.
Chrysalis is also a story about agency, taking control of body and mind, and the fine lines between fortitude, self-preservation, solitude and isolation. And all this is achieved through a true page-turner that demands to be read in one intense, enriching session.
In Part One we see through Elliot’s eyes as he’s drawn to a newcomer to his gym. A woman who’s strong, direct, utterly unselfconscious, and not afraid to take up space with her body. He’s immediately in her thrall: “I got the impression that she didn’t care what we thought. She wasn’t here to play a part in someone else’s spectacle because she had her own goals in mind”.
Next we meet her mother, and discover the woman’s tumultuous childhood and multiple transformations that were “swift and disarming”. But still, when her daughter severs family connections, her mother remarks, “I never wanted her to leave. I wanted to come home to her for always”.
Finally, we see her through the eyes of a colleague and friend who helps her heal in the wake of an abusive relationship and witnesses her transformation into the woman Elliot is enthralled by at the gym. A woman whose strength and online persona has garnered a cultish following of people who “don’t want change or process, they want something permanent they can trust”.
These days, her mother remarks, “some parts of her life are lived entirely in public; the rest she keeps to herself”. Her mother also regards her daughter’s reinvention online as manifesting her desire to avoid “having to confront the complexity of another human being”.
Exploring how women’s agency and control can result in retreating from the world, this remarkable novel reveals fundamental dissonances between selfhood and society with fresh, thought-provoking finesse.
Joanne Owen
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Chrysalis Synopsis
An unnerving, compelling and utterly contemporary debut novel about one woman's metamorphosis into an online phenomenon, from a Sunday Times Short Story Award-shortlisted writer.
She is watched by Elliot as he trains in the gym. He notices her dedication to building her body and taking up space, and he is drawn to her strength. She is observed by her mother, as she grows from a taciturn, tremulous child into a determined and distant woman, who severs all familial ties. She is observed by her former colleague Susie, who offers her sanctuary and support as she leaves her partner and her job and rebuilds her life, transforms her body, and reinvents herself online. Each of these three witnesses to the woman desires closeness. Each is left with only the husk of who she was before she became someone else: a woman on a singular and solitary path with the power to inspire and to influence her followers, for good and ill.
An oblique, intimate novel told in lucid, beguiling prose, Chrysalis a story about solitude and selfhood, and about the blurred line between self-care and narcissism. It is about controlling the body and the mind, about the place of the individual within society and what is means when someone choses to leave society behind. It is strikingly contemporary story about the search for answers and those we trust to give them to us.
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Press Reviews
Anna Metcalfe Press Reviews
'Unputdownable, ice-cool and wittily contemporary, Chrysalis announces Anna Metcalfe as a distinctive and daring fresh literary voice. Utterly original and with shades of Ottessa Moshfegh, Patricia Lockwood, Yoko Ogawa and Alexandra Kleeman, this brilliant portrayal of desire and transcendence had me totally entranced' Sharlene Teo, author of Ponti WOW.
'I just devoured this. What a wonderful, painful, funny novel... It's so beautiful and cruel, and summed up just perfectly by the ending - a flawless final sentence, one of the best I've ever read, it absolutely gave me chills' Avni Doshi
'Incredibly smart and totally unique... Ranging from online obsession, to mothers and daughters, to the very nature of selfhood, the whole thing is strange and warm and, crucially, very funny... I savoured every last brilliant sentence' Ruth Gilligan, author of The Butchers
'A beautifully conceived triptych, shining and modern' Lillian Fishman, author of Acts of Service
'A masterclass in character, Chrysalis is an unsettling and brilliant portrait - not just of a woman in transformation or of those who fall into her orbit, but also of a world defined simultaneously by our isolation and by our longing to connect. This is a sharply-wrought, surprisingly tender book about how our internal changes create external change... often in ways we didn't intend' Jen Silverman, author of We Play Ourselves
Author
About Anna Metcalfe
Anna Metcalfe's fiction has been published in The Best of British Short Stories, The Dublin Review and Lighthouse Journal, among other places. She has an MA and PhD in Creative Writing from UEA and lectures in Creative Writing at the University of Birmingham. In 2014 she was the youngest writer ever to be shortlisted for the Sunday Times EFG Short Story Award for her story 'Number Three' and in 2016 her debut collection of short stories Blind Water Pass was published by John Murray.
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