Gym
Verena Kessler author Lucy Lee Jones translator
Format:Hardback
Publisher:Pan Macmillan
Publishing:4th Feb '27
£14.99
This title is due to be published on 4th February, and will be despatched as soon as possible.
Gym by Verena Kessler is a sweat-slicked, painfully funny novel about obsession, ambition and a woman’s doomed attempt to run from herself. Translated from the German by Lucy Lee Jones.
A woman walks into a gym and lies to get a job.
The gym is a palace of possibility. Here she can transform and start a new life, away from emails and presentations and stressful promotions.
And she can finally get her probation officer off her back.
When people start asking questions, she finds herself pushed to her limits again. A little lie can tumble into a big one, and we can never really escape who we are.
But you can get through anything when there’s no line you wouldn’t cross.
It’s just a question of willpower.
Verena Kessler never tells stories with a raised finger; she does so lightly, amusingly, and comically, and quite wickedly . . . Truly magnificent! -- Christine Westermann
Maximum entertainment . . . This book goes down like a good techno spinning class: fast-paced, sweaty, and not a second too long -- Thore Rausch
Kessler mercilessly holds a mirror up to everyone who knows ambition, doggedness, and the pressure to be perfect, driving her protagonist into a delusion from which there is no escape – #unhingedwomen at its best -- Linn Könnecke
In the mirrors of the mega-gym, we look ourselves in the eye. Verena Kessler tells the story of the abysses of our time in a way that is incredibly gripping, dazzling, and funny -- Ruth-Maria Thomas
A truly funny and witty work * Cherrypicker, Goethe Institut *
ISBN: 9781037406782
Dimensions: unknown
Weight: unknown
208 pages