In dystopian Hong Kong, a new government program incentivizes physical conjoinment between individuals through a painful and disruptive surgery, promising personal fulfillment and a reduced cost of living. Hon Lai Chu’s unnamed narrator is broke and knee-deep in her dissertation on the subject, critical but increasingly unmoored by the implications—and the possibilities. Surely it is better for society to give up your autonomy if it means taking fewer resources, as the conjoined do, right?

Hon Lai Chu, one of the foremost writers working in Hong Kong today, sets her characters loose in a macabre reality animated by sketchy institutions and characters with elusive motivations. Politically and socially allegorical, Mending Bodies, translated by Jacqueline Leung, challenges our safe understandings of people, bodies, and governments.