You Feel It Just Below the Ribs: A Novel

Jeffrey Cranor · Janina Matthewson

Nov 2021 · HarperAudio · Narrated by Kirsten Potter and Adepero Oduye

About this audiobook

A haunting, provocative novel, You Feel It Just Below the Ribs is a fictional autobiography in an alternate twentieth century that chronicles one woman’s unusual life, including the price she pays to survive and the cost her choices hold for the society she is trying to save.

Born at the end of the old world, Miriam grows up during The Great Reckoning, a sprawling, decades-long war that nearly decimates humanity and strips her of friends and family. Devastated by grief and loneliness, she emotionally exiles herself, avoiding relationships or allegiances, and throws herself into her work—disengagement that serves her when the war finally ends, and The New Society arises.

To ensure a lasting peace, The New Society forbids anything that may cause tribal loyalties, including traditional families. Suddenly, everyone must live as Miriam has chosen to—disconnected and unattached. A researcher at heart, Miriam becomes involved in implementing this detachment process. She does not know it is the beginning of a darkly sinister program that will transform this new world and the lives of everyone in it. Eventually, the harmful effects of her research become too much for Miriam, and she devises a secret plan to destroy the system from within, endangering her own life.

But is her “confession” honest—or is it a fabrication riddled with lies meant to conceal the truth?

A jarring and uncanny tale of loss, trauma, and the power of human connection and deception, You Feel It Just Below the Ribs is a portrait of a disturbing alternate world eerily within reach, and an examination of the difficult choices we must make to survive in it.

Ratings and reviews

I seriously enjoyed this book. I listened to the audiobook version in one, long session while working, and I feel like that was a good way to experience this whole story. Without making this review too long, I would like to point out some qualities that particularly hit me in my sweet spot. -The presentation: The way that we were introduced to this story and had it presented as an autobiographical work was particularly good and I felt was especially immersive in the way that commentary was overlaid. That was an excellent way of inserting world-building and gave a greater sense of the setting overall. It had a really nice, smooth build up of information and increasing revelations about just how bad the world had gone in a very matter-of-fact way. The ending bit of narration also just capped things off in a perfect way. -The Setting: I am an absolute sucker for dystopias and end of the world stories, especially when the focus is on the people who survived or are rebuilding after the supposed end of the world. This story played on that archetype so well and did so without ever feeling overdramatic or too tropey. It was also a welcome surprise to have the setting in an alternate past, which brought a new flavor and perspective by keeping some things familiar to our own history and changing others entirely. I haven't personally come across many novels like that and may simply have not been exposed, but it felt fresh and exciting to me. -The scale: A small note, but I felt it important to include that it's really great to be able to follow the protagonist from her youth all the way through her life. Seeing all the changes and developments she and the world went through through her eyes was very satisfying and really got me invested. -The protagonist: I loved Miriam. She was shown repeatedly through her life and even the way she recounted or reflected through a flawed, biased viewpoint to be a deeply flawed individual. She was imperfect and had a lot of key markers of trauma behavior that followed her throughout her life in a realistic way. Despite her flaws and obvious faults, shortcomings, and mistakes, she has a certain charm and appeal to her that I think comes from feeling like she is a real, full person. -Representation! LGBTQ+ representation is handled really well in this story. It's presented very naturally, organically, without a boasting show of fan fair or sense that the author is patting themselves on the back for having queer representation in their book, which is sometimes hard to find. It was presented as natural, as reasonable and expected as any other relationship might be. I found that really refreshing and encouraging. Also, I'm not sure if this was intentional or not, but I felt like Miriam was definitely neurodivergent. The way she thought about and experienced the world came across as very autistically coded on top of how she filtered things through her lens of trauma, which would be really nice representation if that was intentionally done.

About the author

Jeffrey Cranor cowrites the Welcome to Night Vale and Within the Wires podcasts. He also cocreates theater and dance pieces with choreographer/wife Jillian Sweeney. They live in New York.

Janina Matthewson is the author of the novel Of Things Gone Astray and the novella The Understanding of Women. She cowrites Within the Wires, and has also written for Murmurs, The Cipher, and Passenger List. Originally from New Zealand, she now lives in London.