Ward

A man wakes up trapped in a woman's body with no memory of how he got there, then discovers that the body is pregnant.He knows he's an accountant. He knows the year. He doesn't know his name, doesn't know how he got to this café table in Minneapolis, and doesn't recognize the small, soft, unmistakably female hand he reaches for the coffee with. The voice that comes out of his mouth isn't his. The chest, the hips, the weight, the way the body sits and stands - none of it is his. And he can't get out.Within hours he's in a psychiatric ward. The husband who visits on Thursdays calls him by a woman's name. The other patient in the corner chair, Nadia, becomes his confidante. He surfaces and sinks. Days disappear. Each time he comes back the body has gone on without him - kept its appointments, lived a life, made choices he had no part in.And then, months in, standing at the bathroom mirror, he understands what the body has been doing all the time he wasn't there.The Ward is a slow-burn, deeply embodied transformation novel about a man who cannot escape a body that is becoming, by the day, more thoroughly not his - and what he does when that body asks him to be present for the most extraordinary thing it will ever do.