There is a scene about halfway through The Shadow of the Object that I would like to describe carefully, because it is the reason to read the book.
An elderly German woman is in a private hospital in Mexico City with pneumonia. She is meant to fly home the next day. Instead of resting, she asks a nurse to fetch the woman from the floor below, the one with the bandaged hand, and when she arrives the room is already dark and there is a small tin instrument on the table beside the lamp.
Then she starts to project. A nun with a scarlet-tipped dagger, her mouth a gash of red. A skeleton in a plumed hat whose eyes move left, then right. A hare in Prussian blue. Three black gondolas on turquoise water. A grotto with an empty boat on the lake. Nurses gather at the door to watch, laughing softly, and the narrator finds herself thinking that the images are not coming from the lantern at all but out of the old woman's lungs, one on every out-breath.
That night, the old woman dies.
How The Shadow of the Object Gets Them Into the Same Room
Flora is in her forties and lives in London, where she polishes silver in a Soho jewellery shop. She is very good at it, and she is honest that it is the only thing she has ever been very good at. The shop's stock runs to skulls, bats, a snail, and one ring modelled on an eye with an infection in it.
It has been three years since she last went home, and on her third night back in Mexico City she waves goodnight to her mother and stepfather and the family Alsatian sees a hand floating in the air with no body attached, and bites it eight times.
Three operations. A long stay. And in a corridor at night, unable to sleep, she finds Wilhelmina Blau in a wheelchair, demanding a cigarette from anyone who will listen.
Wilhelmina once owned one of the great private collections of pre-cinema optical toys in the world. Lanterns, spinning discs, viewing boxes, cut-paper puppets. Something like forty thousand pieces. She got rid of nearly the whole lot after her husband went into the water and did not come out.
What The Shadow of the Object Does Better Than Almost Anyone
Objects. That is the whole answer.
I have never read anybody who can make a thing sit on the page like this. A drip beside a bed leans over it "like an arthritic nurse". A dried Mexican catfish skeleton, bought at a market, has bones "like ancient lace". A woman describes her collection as a room where every instrument is a cage with an illusion trapped inside, and says she sometimes felt like going round feeding them oil and electricity.
And there is a line about how your fantasy life quietly closes down as you get older, the possibilities departing like ships until the dock is bare, which she notices happening to herself before forty. I put the book down for a minute after that.
The Thing in The Shadow of the Object That Broke Me
Near the end, in the least dramatic way imaginable, Chloe Aridjis tells you who made the lantern.
It comes in the form of an article in a hobbyist newsletter. Johann Falk, a toymaker in Nuremberg, founded a small tin-toy firm in 1895. Twenty-three men and twenty-six women. Solidly crafted lanterns with no special features, easy to buy, sold in toy shops and opticians, and nobody thought of them as Jewish lanterns because they were fully assimilated into every collection.
In 1936 he was one of twenty-nine Nuremberg toymakers forced to sell up. He escaped to England, then across to America, and was dead by 1942, his naturalisation papers never having come through. Eight Falks from Nuremberg died in the Shoah.
The prose does not raise its voice by a semitone. It just tells you, and moves on, and the object you have been carrying around for a hundred pages changes weight in your hands.
Where It Falters
I want to be straight about this, because I have been enthusiastic so far.
The second half of The Shadow of the Object is much weaker than the first, and the reason is Max.
Max is Wilhelmina's son, mid-thirties, adrift, living in her house by the canal with a mouse called Isidore. Flora ends up spending a great deal of the novel with him and I could not tell you a single thing he wants. He is guarded, he answers in three words, he is described at one point as an unfinished portrait, and he stays that way. When they eventually end up in bed together I felt nothing at all, which is a problem when the last third of a novel is built on it.
There is also no real pressure after Mexico. Part one has a hospital, a deadline and a woman running out of breath. Part two is beautiful walks and beautiful digressions and objects described beautifully, and it drifts.
The Small Thing I Loved Most in The Shadow of the Object
Isidore the mouse gets his own chapter. Several pages, from his point of view, about which papers make the best nesting material (middle-aged books printed in Italy, apparently, since they hold moisture and are kinder on the teeth) and about the vast dark book he once found open on a table in a library, whose figures were smaller than himself.
It is a completely unnecessary passage and it is one of the most charming things I have read all year.
If You Finish This and Need Something Else
Asunder is Chloe Aridjis's own best companion piece, about a guard at the National Gallery who watches paintings and collects moths. Beyond her, The Empusium by Olga Tokarczuk shares the sanatorium air and the sense of being observed by something you cannot see, and W.G. Sebald's The Rings of Saturn is the ancestor of every novel that walks and digresses and lets history surface inside a description of an object. If you want the pair from this longlist, May We Feed the King is uncannily close in preoccupation and, I think, the better book.
Where The Shadow of the Object Leaves You
The last page is three lines. Not a scene. A description of a single blank glass slide: no image on it, only fingerprints. Accidental design, a moment captured, impossible to recreate.
That is what six nights of conversation left behind, and it is what the whole novel has been about. A woman lost forty thousand objects and kept one lantern. The lantern outlived her. Somebody else is carrying it now.
I did not love this book the way I wanted to, and the man at the centre of its second half is a hole in it. But I will remember the projector in the dark hospital room, and the nurses in the doorway, and the toymaker in New York waiting for papers that never came, for a very long time. That is the Ragged School Museum end of London, incidentally, where the memorial takes place, and if you have never been it is worth the trip.
Some books you admire. The Shadow of the Object keeps handing you things, and then mislays half of them in its second act. Our Booker Prize 2026 longlist guide has the rest of the field if this one is not your entry point.