Please Don't Touch the Body: Stories

By turns tender and irreverent, the eleven genre-bending stories in Please Don't Touch the Body revel in the devastation – and power – of being alive today.

Is there solace to be found in a secret life as a sex columnist? Is a hypochondriac new graduate really dying of stomach cancer – and would she find that preferable to navigating the freedoms and responsibilities of adult life? What would happen if Ronald Reagan were reincarnated as the much-loved puppy of a young queer woman?

Doyle envisions answers to all of this and more in Please Don't Touch the Body. Preoccupied by the bizarre realities of modern life, this rich collage of stories reveals an original mind and a writer to watch. For fans of Madeline Cash, Julia Armfield and Sarah Rose Etter.

'A magnificent debut. In these carefully crafted stories, lonely people come face to face with the strange or the unsettling, leading to messy, horny, funny and ultimately profound complications. Doyle is a rising star' - Laila Lalami, Pulitzer-Prize finalist and author of The Dream Hotel

'Doyle's dark, dazzling humor offsets the absurdity of life... Doyle's writing, elegant and mesmerizing, results in a curious, alluring combination of high drama and supernatural mystery' - Shelf Awareness

'Each story feels like an entire cinematic universe' - Debutiful

'An electrifying debut that thrums with dark humor, desire and the uncanny ache of being alive... Inviting us to experience the body - its hungers, its betrayals, its beauty - in all its unruly splendor' - Alex Espinoza, author of The Sons of El Rey

'Stunning - wonderfully dry yet musical, with potent characterizations and sad humor' - Charmaine Craig, author of Miss Burma

'Strange, beautiful and deftly written. Here are women suffocating in their passivity, teetering between the lives that had been forced upon them and the lives they've yet to choose. Doyle is a writer to watch' - Rita Chang-Eppig, author of Deep as the Sky, Red as the Sea

'Open-heartedly honest, fiercely intelligent and wonderfully fresh' - Jessie Ren Marshall, author of Women! In! Peril!

© 2026 Verve Books (E-bog): 9780857307194

Udgivelsesdato

E-bog: 5. november 2026