Body of the Republic

Body of the Republic is a fierce, luminous novel about power, witness, and the dangerous myth that silence keeps anyone safe. Set in an unnamed nation that feels hauntingly close to our own world, the story begins with a single moment: the President, beloved and burdened in equal measure, is touched in public by a stranger who believes he has a right to her body. A seven-second clip of the incident, captured by dozens of phones, becomes the spark that fractures the country’s collective imagination.
What begins as an argument about “what really happened” quickly mutates into an earthquake of political spin, moral panic, online warfare, and whispered solidarity. As media figures trivialize the event and institutions scramble to contain the fallout, a strange hum begins to thread itself through the nation’s circuitry. Broadcasts glitch. Streetlights flicker. Women who have endured the everyday trespasses of public life feel something stirring—something old, collective, and awake.
As the President confronts the consequences of being the most visible woman in the Republic, she becomes the unwilling focal point of a transformation that exceeds politics and swells into myth. What rises in the aftermath is not a movement orchestrated by ideology, but a force powered by memory itself—a fusion of grief, refusal, and the sacred fire of autonomy long denied.
Blending political drama with elements of magical realism and feminist myth-making, Body of the Republic examines the gap between public narrative and private truth, the violence hidden inside “harmless” gestures, and the uncanny moment when a society realizes that its deepest wounds are looking back. Through striking imagery, electric prose, and a narrative that grows in power with each chapter, the novel explores what happens when a nation’s women collectively stop apologizing for the echo of their own voices.
Both intimate and sweeping, speculative and relentlessly grounded in emotional truth, Body of the Republic is a story about the fragile architecture of public power—and the unstoppable revolution that begins the moment someone dares to reclaim their own body.