Immaculate Conception

Enka meets Mathilde at art school and is dazzled: Mathilde makes work that feels genuinely, effortlessly original, the kind Enka has been straining to produce her whole life. In a cutthroat art world where reputation is everything, Enka pours herself into their friendship, orbiting Mathilde's brilliance and slowly building a life alongside it.

But as Mathilde's fame grows and she begins to drift, Enka's devotion curdles into something more desperate. Then comes SCAFFOLD — a cutting-edge technology that promises to deepen empathy by letting one person inhabit another's mind, accessing their memories, inspirations, and buried traumas. For Enka, it offers the ultimate closeness: to finally know Mathilde completely, and to bind them together forever. The question is what such intimacy costs, and where love ends and possession begins.

Ling Ling Huang's blisteringly smart near-future novel is a tender and disturbing portrait of friendship, ambition, and obsession — a story about the terrifying desire to truly know, and to keep, another person.