Poor Things: Read the extraordinary book behind the award-winning film

Our summary description

As Independent Scottish booksellers, we write all of our descriptions personally, we hope you enjoy this one.

Godwin Baxter is driven by an exacting vision of improvement. In late Victorian Glasgow, his ambition finds form when he recovers the drowned body of Bella and brings her back to life through an act of scientific audacity. What follows is not simply an experiment, but the beginning of a struggle over ownership, desire and will.

Dr Archibald McCandless watches with a mixture of admiration and jealousy as Bella awakens into the world. Yet the question at the heart of this story is not what these men want from her, but what Bella makes of herself. As she moves beyond the operating theatre, her life opens out into travel and experience, carrying her through places marked by indulgence, cruelty and chance.

This is literary fiction with gothic undertones, attentive to freedom and self determination. It asks what it means to choose a life, and who is permitted that choice, as Bella’s story unfolds towards an uncertain and interrupted reckoning.