The ant and its ontological status begin to loom over their entire life together, initiating a dialectic only love can hope to resolve. Normally, I'm not a fan of magic being injected into my fiction reads, but this felt more philosophical to me than fantastical. Por la noche, Rachel se despierta con un dolor en el ojo y está convencida de que una hormiga ha entrado en su interior usando ese órgano, algo que cuenta con toda la incredulidad por parte de su mujer Eliza. I wish I could provide a more helpful review, but a description could never do the book justice, and I honestly believe it’s the sort of book where the less you know going in, the better. The characters, much like test persons in a trial, act under the conditions of the experiment - the reader takes on the role of a scientist studying human behavior.

The beautiful marriage relationship between central characters (Rachel and Eliza), and indeed the different versions of their selves, is so sensitively rendered. While each chapter unpacks a different philosophical thought, the writing is not cerebral, in fact, it has a lightness and easy flow.

Later on there’s another story in which we approach a main character’s imminent death, but while appropriately disturbing, it does not quite land with the same blow to the reader’s feelings. I'm going to have to read this book again at some point because I fear in my enthusiasm for it I might have rushed it. Regardless, the ripple of a book's effect on your life can be strong; whether the change is immediate or revealed much later varies from book to book. And through all these the book asks: who are we; what does it mean to experience the world; how can we really know other people or even really know ourselves and our own reality.

This is a fascinating philosophical fiction novel with an interesting premise - each of the 10 chapters begin with a classic thought experiment, which are like writing prompts that take the book forward. You can change your choices at any time by visiting Cookie preferences, as described in the Cookie notice.For me, the most powerful chapters are the fourth and fifth, which compose a kind of central diptych: the narrative from the ant’s viewpoint, followed by Rachel’s meditation, in extremity, on her “partnership” with the creature, which had “crawled in to her eye one night and changed her life”.