Your Heart is a Muscle the Size of a Fist

A vital, powerful read, Your Heart is a Muscle the Size of a Fist is an absorbing, multi-faceted, acutely hopeful novel - Patrick deWitt, author of The Sisters Brothers, shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize

A great wrenching beautiful book - Laline Paull, author of THE BEES, shortlisted for the Baileys Prize for Fiction

A symphony of a novel. In the contemporary tradition of Aleksandar Hemon and Philipp Meyer, with echoes of Michael Ondaatje and Arundhati Roy, Yapa strides forward with a literary molotov cocktail to light up the dark - Colum McCann, National Book Award-winning author of Let the Great World Spin

Your Heart is a Muscle the Size of Fist is an enthralling street-level vision of the 1999 WTO riots, a story visceral, horrifying harrowing, and often heroic. But above all, this book is a full-throated chorus of voices on all sides - protestors, cops, delegates, politicians, and ramblers - as democracy runs headlong into the machinery of global power. Sunil Yapa has achieved something special, a story that is as tragic as it is relevant, as unflinching as it is humane. Watch out - Smith Henderson, author of Fourth of July Creek

Your Heart is a Muscle the Size of a Fist is a stunningly orchestrated work of narrative power. This novel marshals all the vital forces of our existence - from the domestic to the political - and offers them to the reader with equal doses of compassion and beauty - Dinaw Mengestu, author of All Our Names

There is nothing to say about Sunil Yapa’s debut novel that its wonderful title doesn’t already promise - its heart beats and bleeds on every page, in prose so powerful it feels built of muscle and tissue and sinew and sweat. This book is delightfully, forcefully alive, and I feel more alive for having read it - Eleanor Henderson, author of Ten Thousand Saints