‘Deep down she had always known that the world was like this. It was incredible to think of all those people in their offices in London still living their grey lives, while here in the Philippines… this. Life bursting out everywhere.’

Fresh from the UK, Emma thinks she has fallen in love with a place, a person, and pursues the man of her dreams with a colonial zeal. But for all her poetic sensibilities, she seems unaware of the destruction she is capable of leaving in her wake.

A beautifully written first novel, Foreign Bodies explores the spaces between people, and the nature of encounters in romantic idylls on the other side of the world.