"This book is so strangely moving and truly funny and sad and beautiful. An impressive debut from a writer already in possession of a unique voice."-Miriam Toews
Bruce and Dougie Reuben are conjoined twins. Dougie is an ambitious amateur boxer and Bruce is a dreamy bookkeeper. As a romantic relationship forms between Bruce and a woman he's only corresponded with through letters, Dougie's sole focus is to secure the Heavyweight Amateur Boxing title as one half of "The Reuben Beast"-mysterious blackouts and severe headaches be damned.
The Pugilist and the Sailor examines the unique relationships between conjoined brothers, parents, crushes, and unexpected mentors. A shifting story about the entanglement of longing and belonging, compromise and connection, this novel is ultimately a consideration of family and what it means to find your place both within and beyond it.
Nadia Ragbar lives in Toronto with her partner and son. Her short fiction has appeared in Broken Pencil and This Magazine, among other outlets. Her flash fiction appeared in The Unpublished City, an anthology curated by Dionne Brand, which was shortlisted for the 2018 Toronto Book Award. The Pugilist and the Sailor is her first novel.
"This book is so strangely moving and truly funny and sad and beautiful. An impressive debut from a writer already in possession of a unique voice."-Miriam Toews
"Bruce and Dougie are conjoined twins-one a fiery boxer, the other a dreamy bookkeeper. Inseparable by birth but diverging in desire, they share a body, a home, and a tangled history of longing-for solitude, for love, for a different kind of life. A deeply intimate, character-driven novel about family, yearning, and the aching complexity of connection, The Pugilist and the Sailor is a story of bodies that defy definition, and the invisible lines that bind us-through time, through blood, and through the stories we carry."-Carrianne Leung, author of That Time I Loved You and The Wondrous Woo
