by Brian Willems

Publication date: 15 September 2026

Present-day Minneapolis. Dr Ana Jovanovic, oncologist, goes against the advice of her hospital's tumour board and schedules her patient Jonathan for exploratory surgery. When a tragic event sends the doctor’s life into a tailspin, she takes a sudden sabbatical. Now sharply aware of her own mortality, the doctor is confronted with decisions about quality of life and quality of death.

‘The Surviving Cells is a highly personal, detailed, and meticulous novel about the unbearable complexity of care. It reminds us that survival is never simple, nor the risks we take when helping others to do so. After reading it, you'll never see medicine – or love – the same way again.’

– Susan Finlay, author of The Jacques Lacan Foundation

'In The Surviving Cells, bureaucratic bullshit will pollute the best of intentions. But love is everywhere as well, sprouting like an invasive plant. Brian Willems’ close tracking of a vivid consciousness that (without warning) begins to lose access to external reality is both heartbreaking and stunning. I cannot stop thinking about this book.'

— Dodie Bellamy, author of When the Sick Rule the World

‘The Surviving Cells haunted me long after I finished reading it, returning me to my uneasy body, knowing I will be death’s subject, if not now, then when… It is a book about bodies, inside and out, container and contained; about the border line between the heart of one’s being and the strangeness of each decentred subject – that which is radically unassimilable. It asks how we might live and how we might die when confronted with a finite limit, the ethics of assuming mortality. It is also dryly witty, like Ana herself. I am re-reading it already.'

– Sharon Kivland, author of These Are Addressed to You

‘At the heart of Brian Willems’s novel The Surviving Cells lies cancer, a disease that drives the narrative like an invisible force: turning fates, shifting perspectives, erasing boundaries, and transforming relationships. The doctor becomes the patient and time, once abundant, suddenly grows scarce. The barrier between the one who heals and the one who suffers rises only to disappear.
‘Through a series of such reversals, the narrator guides the story with surgical precision, cutting through illusions to reach the very core. But cancer is not merely a disease of the body. It is also a metaphor: a mutation spreading through society, from a repressive system that determines the fate of migrants to the conversion of terminal conditions into profit.
‘Do we have any control at all, even over our own bodies? Does our life depend on a chain of fragile, invisible decisions?
‘This novel offers no simple answers. Instead, it leads us through the labyrinth of the fragile body, posing questions that feel almost terminal themselves. In a world where unpredictability and precarity are its only constants, literature finds what medicine cannot: a space beyond cells. Although cancer fuels this story, it does not have the final word.’

– Maša Kolanović, winner of the European Prize for Literature and author of Underground Barbie

Paperback original
224 pages, 180 × 120 mm
RRP £14.99
ISBN 978-1-0683001-6-5