Eliza Clark’s debut novel, Boy Parts (2020), is a work of transgressive fiction that follows Irina Sturges, a 28-year-old artist in Newcastle, England, who photographs ordinary men in explicit, fetishistic poses, using her camera to exert power and control over them. When a London gallery invites her to exhibit her work, she sees an opportunity to revive her career. Instead, it triggers a destructive self-examination that impacts her codependent best friend and a shy supermarket cashier who becomes her new muse. The novel explores themes of Gendered Power Imbalances in Objectification and Abuse, The Unreliability of Memory, and Class Anxiety Shaping One’s Aspirations.

Boy Parts quickly gained a cult following upon its initial UK release and was shortlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize. Clark, who was born in Newcastle and studied art in London, drew from her experiences to explore the UK’s North-South divide and the class tensions of the contemporary art world. In 2023, she was named one of Granta’s Best of Young British Novelists, a prestigious honor given once a decade that cemented her status as a major new voice in British literature. Her second novel, Penance (2023), continues her exploration of violence and obsession through the lens of the true-crime genre.

This guide is based on the 2023 Harper Perennial edition.

Content Warning: The source text and this guide contain depictions of graphic violence, illness, mental illness, sexual violence and harassment, rape, substance use, disordered eating, suicidal ideation and self-harm, child sexual abuse, cursing, antigay bias, gender discrimination, sexual content, physical abuse, emotional abuse, animal death, and child death.

Plot Summary

The novel opens with Irina Sturges, a 28-year-old fetish photographer from Newcastle, arriving hungover to her part-time bartending job. A woman confronts her, revealing that her 16-year-old son Daniel recently posed for Irina’s explicit photographs, having used his older brother’s passport to fake his age. Irina deletes the images from her website but privately rationalizes the situation, explaining she had asked Daniel for identification. The mother punches Irina and flees. Irina manipulates the aftermath, crying on command to secure sympathy from her boss, Ergi, who sends her home and later places her on paid leave.

Irina’s best friend Flo consoles her over the altercation. The two have known each other since their foundation art course nearly a decade earlier. Irina secretly reads Flo’s private blog, where Flo posts about her unrequited crush on Irina and her belief that Irina may have undiagnosed Borderline Personality Disorder. Flo’s boyfriend, Michael, generally distrusts Irina and resents Flo’s devotion to her.

Irina receives a career-changing email from Jamie Henderson, a junior curator at London-based gallery Hackney Space, inviting her to participate in an exhibition on Contemporary Fetish Art. The show requires five to six photographs, a film of her creative process, and contributions to a limited-run photobook. Irina’s hypercritical mother, Yvonne, is unimpressed because she finds Irina’s art repulsive. At her local Tesco, Irina notices Eddie, a new cashier she finds immediately attractive, and gives him her business card, pitching him as a potential model. Eddie later agrees but requests anonymity because he is about to begin primary school teacher training.

To prepare the photobook, Irina sorts through her physical archive, which resurfaces formative traumas. When Irina was 16, her A-level art teacher in his forties, Lesley, groomed her through private meetings and coded birthday cards. Her mother eventually discovered the affair and had Lesley removed from the school. Irina insists she liked Lesley and found the public exposure at school, where she was seen as “a raped child” (43), more damaging than the relationship itself. The archive also traces her artistic development: a foundation course that pushed her into photography, and a breakthrough undergraduate project at Central Saint Martins called What would you do to be my Boyfriend?, in which she brought strange men to her student housing, stripped them to their underwear, and photographed them. The project earned her a solo show and critical recognition, which validated her despite the outsider status she felt she had among her wealthier London-based peers.

The archive also yields the story of Frank Steel, born Francesca Leigh, a butch lesbian guest lecturer who challenged Irina’s work as cruel and voyeuristic, then began a six-month relationship with her. Their photographs together are distinctly warmer and more tender than anything else in Irina’s body of work. The relationship collapsed when Frank wanted to go public and Irina refused. After the breakup, Flo cut her hair to resemble Frank’s, and she and Irina spent a summer using drugs and having sex. Flo hoped they would enter a relationship. Irina treated her as a distraction.

Meanwhile, Irina’s present-day life grows increasingly fraught. At a house party hosted by Will, a barista and model who is infatuated with her, Irina takes a large dose of ketamine and experiences a severe dissociative episode, during which she sees visions of a dark-haired boy with scars. She wakes in Will’s bed the next morning. Physical evidence suggests Will attempted to rape her while she was incapacitated. When Flo questions whether Irina is sure about what happened, citing her pattern of filling in blanks during blackouts, Irina is furious and stops speaking to her. Flo’s blog entries from this period reveal her agonized ambivalence: She defends Irina publicly but privately catalogs instances where she has caught Irina fabricating stories.

Irina and Eddie begin a violent sexual relationship. During their first encounter, Irina strangles Eddie repeatedly, releasing only when he turns purple and bats at her wrists. He eventually begs her to stop and shoves her off, then immediately apologizes. When Eddie visits again, the two share stories of childhood sexual abuse, and the intimacy of these disclosures deepens their bond, though Irina is disturbed to find herself aroused by Eddie’s account. In a later filmed shoot for the exhibition, Irina, drunk and high on cocaine, escalates further: She harms and humiliates him while he trembles and cries in the bunny mask she uses to protect his anonymity. Eddie avoids her for a week, then sends a long email declaring that her affection comes in “scraps” that are still better than a full meal with anyone else. Irina does not reply.

Irina experiences intense hallucinations. During a shoot with Dennis, a middle-aged man she scouted on a bus, Irina hits him over the head with her camera and hallucinates glass embedded in his face. She subconsciously retrieves a cleaver and bin bags, but Dennis regains consciousness. She drives compulsively to a wooded area and digs beneath a dead tree, unearthing the skeleton of Fritz, Flo’s cat whom she once lost. The discovery triggers a crisis: Irina had expected to find a human skull.

Working deeper into her archive, Irina finds hidden Polaroids throughout her house, photographs she believed she had destroyed. They document a buried memory from her MA years in London: She found a boy at a bus stop early one morning, brought him home, and when he panicked and attacked her, she broke a wine bottle on his face. Believing he was dying, she strangled him in the bathtub, dismembered him with a cleaver, and buried the parts in remote locations. She also killed Fritz, whose bloody paw prints had tracked through the flat. She mails all the Polaroids to Mr. B, her anonymous patron who buys explicit photographs through a post-office box in Belize. Though he accepts the transaction, his email address and all previous correspondence soon vanish from her inbox as if he never existed. The 30,000-pound fee for the Polaroids is substantial enough for Irina to quit the bar.

On Irina’s 29th birthday, Flo kisses her. Irina feels nothing and shoves her away. Flo, who left Michael at Irina’s encouragement, is crushed. Irina travels to London for the exhibition, where her former friend Sera reveals that the invitation to present at Hackney Space was arranged through Sera’s personal connections. At the gallery, Irina clashes with Remy Hart, a young photographer whose work is included because his uncle Stephen Hart is a major gallery donor. Uncle Stephen buys all six of Irina’s photographs to compensate her for Remy’s bad mood and promises to connect her with major galleries. That night, Irina invites Remy to her hotel room, ties him to the bed, and slices his skin with a letter opener. He escapes while she is vomiting in the bathroom. The next day, he texts casually, framing the encounter as consensual rough play. Irina is enraged that no one treats her violence as genuinely dangerous. She texts Eddie photos of Remy’s injuries; Eddie calls her “a fucking reptile” and asks her not to contact him again.

At dinner with Uncle Stephen, Irina tells him plainly that she killed a boy once. He laughs, taking it for dark humor. When she experiences another hallucination during dinner, she strikes Stephen with a champagne flute, causing real injury. She walks barefoot through Chelsea to Battersea Park and wades into the pond, hoping for cleansing. She reaches for her dead boy’s face in the water, but only yields pond weed.