“This funny and terrifying book is a study of what and how things mean, and don't, in our latest machine age. In it something unforgiveable has happened. The main character, seemingly numbed but bristling with blade-sharp understanding, is only just holding things together and trying to work out how to heal. So she travels to Japan in a search for the other half of a fragmented family. Or is it the world itself that has fragmented? Pink Soap examines the massive everyday pressures we’re all under with real wit and style. It is pristine, brilliant, smart beyond belief. I sense it becoming as much a classic for now as Plath’s The Bell Jar has been for the decades behind us.”—Ali Smith, author of Gliff

“A fascinating and timely glimpse into modern existential angst.”—Ben Reeves, New York Times bestselling author of Everything was Beautiful and Nothing Hurt

“This utterly beguiling book offers a compelling depiction of the way that becoming a stranger to yourself and becoming a stranger to the world so often go hand in hand. I read it as a study in dislocation and language, of losing pain and finding it again. Its deceptively simple fragments clump to form something momentous: a whole universe, eternal and of its moment, complete and slippery as a bar of soap. I loved it.”—Polly Barton, author of What am I, a Deer?

“In Pink Soap—a moving modern ode to disconnection—Anju Gaston renders our atomized digital hell with deadpan brilliance. Subtle, funny, entropic, and fearless, read this book of fragments once for its glittering clarity on big ideas, and then again to savor its sensory precision. This story of an unwell grad student who draws her shrinking bar of soap made me feel more alive.”—Alexander Sammartino, author of Last Acts 

“Anju Gaston's debut novella is a masterfully precise account of a fragile recovery. This is a thrillingly intelligent and clear rendering of a mind divided against itself. I didn't want it to end.”—Andrew Martin, author of Down Time

"Pink Soap is a Tardis. On first reading, it seems slight, but it is more substantial, and abundant, than it appears...In precise, emotionless prose, [the narrator] admits that she cannot trust her thinking, and thus refrains from describing feelings, giving opinions, even using metaphor. The effect can be alienating: this is the antithesis of a page-turner....Yet we do want to know more about this curious narrator."— Kate Darach, The Times Literary Supplement

“Excellent, empathetic…we are gifted [Gaston’s] uncannily astute powers of observation and exquisite, perversely quotable sentences.”—Buzz Magazine