Overview

""A potent portrait of illness and gender oppression . . . This passionate and lyrical work packs a stinging punch.""--Publishers Weekly A dazzling debut novel about a young woman's vexed coming of age in a traditional Azerbaijani community in Russia, grappling under the weight of Muslim patriarchal norms and a debilitating neurological condition. The mysterious affliction leaves her unable to control her muscles, plagued by pain and speech disorders, defying diagnosis. Addressing each body part with the scrupulousness of a medical researcher, the narrator explores memories, traditions, and taboos related to her physical self. In the process, a woman once destined for the role of a beautiful marriageable daughter comes to be perceived as damaged goods. With verbal elegance and poetic power, Egana Djabbarova unveils a hidden world in which illness unexpectedly facilitates her liberation. Her book stands in the proud tradition of confessional feminist writers like Sandra Cisneros, Arundhati Roy, Audre Lorde, Toni Morrison, and Jamaica Kincaid.

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9781954404410

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Reviews

""Djabbarova debuts with a potent portrait of illness and gender oppression in contemporary Azerbaijan, Georgia, and Russia . . . This passionate and lyrical work packs a stinging punch.""--Publishers Weekly ""A woman maps cultural expectations and desires onto her ailing body in Egana Djabbarova's singular novel . . . The book blooms . . . An incisive novel, My Dreadful Body celebrates women's agency, mourns physical losses, and rebels against inherited boundaries.""--Foreword Reviews (Starred review) ""A gripping, vivid novel that is both a lament and a celebration of how a woman's body binds her to Azerbaijani tradition, and frees her from it. Egana Djabarrova's writing is in turn devastating and hopeful; plainspoken and elegiac. I've never read anything like it.""--Claire Oshetsky, author of Poor Deer and Evil Genius ""Egana Djabbarova's wild fever dream of a novel lays bare a world where female utterance is seismic, its eruption a shock of radicalizing violence. In prose marked by intimacy, restraint, and terror, My Dreadful Body introduces a writer of astounding intelligence and power. I could not put it down.""--Honor Moore, author of A Termination ""An exquisite Bildungsroman by an exceptional author reading her own body as the bearer of inherited stigmas, offering a thought-provoking journey into what it's like to grow up as a stranger.""--Sergei Lebedev, author of Oblivion and Untraceable ""This tour de force short novel recounts the narrator Egana's various neurological disorders . . . It's like discovering over time from a charming, charismatic friend various shocking and fascinating details from her life . . . What a wonder she is.""--Russian Life ""An extraordinary novel that translates corporality and estrangement into language.""--Olga Grjasnowa, author of All Russians Love Birch Trees ""Inventive and courageous, passionately feminist, Djabbarova's novel sings and rages against generations of silence. 'The mouth was not intended for speaking, ' she writes, yet her protagonist rebels against this ancestral prohibition and forges her own path with clarity of purpose and language charged with poetic force.""--Olga Zilberbourg, author of Like Water and Other Stories ""In her debut novel, Egana Djabbarova tells the story of a young woman whose neurological disorder makes her life in a strict Muslim Azerbaijani community in Russia even more challenging, but also brings unexpected liberation.""--Ms. Magazine Most Anticipated Feminist Books of 2026. ""The novel connects the pains of chronic illness to the impossible standards that our societies set for women's bodies. The novel promises relief for the narrator through reflection and understanding, and I expect it will do the same for any reader who has ever felt, due to internal or external pressures, that their body is failing them.""--Words Without Borders Most Anticipated Books of 2026 ""One looks ahead with excitement to Egana Djabbarova's future literary career. With her debut novel, she has certainly succeeded in creating an illuminating and poetic work.""--Neue Zürcher Zeitung ""Egana Djabbarova writes in vivid imagery and refined, almost poetic language . . . She shows the oppression of women across generations. It is both impressive and admirable that she has broken this cycle and tells the story.""--ORF Austrian Radio ""It's shocking how much the repression of women is based upon their physicality and also on how women themselves treat their own bodies. In language that's infinitely sensitive, gentle, and poetic, Egana Djabbarova recounts a brutal and sinister state of affairs.""--North German Radio

Author Information

Egana Djabbarova, born in 1992 into an Azerbaijani family in Yekaterinburg, Russia, is a poet, essayist, and scholar. She is the author of several collections of poetry. Having been forced to flee Russia in 2024 because of her LGBTQ activism and opposition to the war in Ukraine, she lives in Hamburg, Germany. Lisa C. Hayden is a literary translator who received her MA in Russian literature from the University of Pennsylvania. She spent six years in Moscow and lives in Maine.

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