Please Don’t Touch the Body
Stories
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Please Don’t Touch the Body
Narrated by:
Alice Dodd, Daniel Henning
Pre-order Now for £12.23
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Narrated by:
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Alice Dodd
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Daniel Henning
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By:
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Emily Doyle
“A magnificent debut” (Laila Lalami) that explores loneliness and community, religion and repression, and the pleasure and pain of womanhood.
By turns tender and irreverent, the 11 genre-bending stories in Please Don’t Touch the Body are thrillingly concerned with the devastation—and power—of being alive today.
In the collection’s first story, a Japanese woman finds healing in a secret life as a sex advice columnist after being fetishized by her white husband for decades. In the fourth story, Ronald Reagan is reincarnated as a puppy and must cope with being squeezed, dropped, and controlled by his young, queer owner. And in “Thank You No Thank You,” a young woman grapples with the rules she learned in her religious childhood, the freedoms of her new and more liberal life, and her actual desires as she vacations with her long-term boyfriend.
Together these inventive, emotionally rich stories reveal an incredible new vision and “a writer to watch” (Rita Chang-Eppig).©2026 Emily Doyle (P)2026 Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
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Critic reviews
Doyle is a knockout writer.
I’ve had the pleasure of glimpsing Emily Doyle’s muscular, heart-forward fiction in a writing workshop, and all I can say is brace yourselves. The body is front and center in these uniquely brewed stories, which range from surreal to poignant . . . This debut collection is thrillingly concerned with how we come to feel at ease in - or in power of - our meatsacks.
Arresting . . . The stories are often bleak yet funny, using elements from science fiction and fantasy to highlight the difficulties characters have with communication . . . This surprising, genre-bending collection will appeal to lovers of grim humor and stories that feature characters learning to break out of constricting public and private roles.
The 11 stories in Emily Doyle’s bracing debut collection, Please Don't Touch the Body, vibrate with undercurrents of guilty desire, delicious rage, and the bewildering mysteries of the underworld . . . Motherhood and its discontents loom large in this mesmerizing debut story collection combining high drama with supernatural mystery and characters spanning a diverse demographic range.
Doyle’s evocative collection . . . showcases ghosts in all forms . . . Doyle’s debut embraces the strange and even stranger . . . Perfect for readers who appreciate oddities and dark humor with a dash of [science fiction].
Surprises abound in Doyle’s strange and sublime debut collection . . . [Doyle] brings her eccentric characters’ humanity into poignant relief . . . Readers will find much to love in these dynamic and heartfelt stories.
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. Emily Doyle is a rising star.
The stories of Please Don’t Touch the Body are stunning—wonderfully dry yet musical, with potent characterizations and sad humor.
Please Don't Touch the Body drew me in with the glitter of a curious idea or question and its big-heartedness kept me reading. Emily Doyle offers up a thoughtful collection that studies the secret, hungry spaces within our loud human lives.
What strange, beautiful, and deftly written stories. 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.
Open-heartedly honest, fiercely intelligent, and wonderfully fresh . . . Please Don't Touch the Body not only surprises and delights, it sings.
Please Don’t Touch the Body is heartbreaking and hopeful, with prose that is spare when necessary and bountiful elsewhere.
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