The Loosening Skin

By Aliya Whiteley

Shortlisted for the Arthur C. Clarke Award, John W. Campbell Award, British Fantasy Awards and the Brave New Words Award.
A gripping and strange story of shedding skins, love and moving on from the award-winning author of The Beauty. Includes an exclusive short story set in the world of The Loosening Skin.

Rose Allington is a bodyguard for celebrities, and she suffers from a rare disease. Her moults come quickly, changing everything about her life, who she is, who she loves, who she trusts.

In a world where people shed their skin, it's a fact of life that we move on and cast off the attachments of our old life. But those memories of love can be touched - and bought - if you know the right people.

Rose's former client, superstar actor Max Black, is hooked on Suscutin, a new wonderdrug that prevents the moult. Max knows his skins are priceless, and moulting could cost him his career.

When one of his skins is stolen, and the theft is an inside job, Max needs the best who ever worked for him - even if she's not the same person.

Includes an exclusive short story set in the world of The Loosening Skin.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
• Release date: Feb 23, 2021
• ISBN: 9781789092349

Aliya Whiteley

Aliya Whiteley's writing has appeared in numerous places, including The Guardian, McSweeney's Internet Tendency and anthologies such as Unsung Stories: This Dreaming Isle and Lonely Planet's Better than Fiction I and II. Her novella for Unsung Stories, "The Beauty," was shortlisted for a Shirley Jackson Award. Her recent novel, The Loosening Skin, has been shortlisted for The Arthur C. Clarke Award.

Reviews for The Loosening Skin

[heylu-1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Can I just start by saying, if you haven’t read anything by Aliya Whiteley before, do it now. The Loosening Skin by Aliya Whiteley is such a hard hitting novel that reaches you on so many levels. You read the synopsis and think, boy, this is weird, but honestly, it makes the most sense. It feels like what The Time Traveler’s Wife should have been — a more realistic version with much better writing.

In this new dystopian world Whiteley builds, humans shed their skin regularly. When they do, all of their emotions go with it. You literally start a new. A physical manifestation of changes that normally happen to us on a microscopic level. People grow and change and grow apart. Yet here, everyone is on a ticking clock. Seven years, you know a relationship can last seven years. You have seven years maximum to love as hard as you can, create as many memories as you can before every piece of affection you held is torn from you and the person you’ve created a life with is nothing but a stranger you’ve a memory of. Sometimes, memory alone is enough to keep the relationship going.

Yet, it isn’t the case for Rose who suffers from a disorder that causes her not only to shed her skin sporadically, but also produces intense disgust and revulsion. She can’t bare to have any reminders of her past life. So what happens? What happens when you love and love and love and it’s suddenly gone? And the person you loved can’t stand to be near you and you can’t stand to move on? It’s just so incredibly heart-wrenching and before I could even realize what Whiteley had done, I was in tears with that feeling and knowledge that had caught me unawares.

What Whiteley does so amazingly well is not only to create a love story with sadness, in fact there are multiple love stories and one is not so sad! What she excels at is creating relationships that are complex and real. Relationships that can endure a change and relationships that cannot. She creates characters that you love and feel so heartbroken for but also despise and recognize they would be a creep in real life. This book, though it doesn’t read like it and doesn’t sound like, it truly an amazing commentary on relationships and what it takes to be sustainable through the different facets every person goes through.

I wholeheartedly encourage every reader to pick up The Loosening Skin by Aliya Whiteley. It’s the perfect introduction to an amazing author whom I’m frankly quite upset is still indie and not adored by legions of readers.

// I voluntarily reviewed a complimentary copy of this title. //

[rivkat_2 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

In a world where humans moult every few years, losing whatever romantic love they had (which can be felt in the discarded skin), a movie star carries out a horrific act against his former bodyguard/lover, who has an extreme form of moulting that leaves her revolted by her past lives. Later, as science develops anti-moulting drugs, various related characters try to figure out what that means and what happened to the bodyguard. It was okay I guess but I didn’t get much out of the AU.