Romance is dead…

He pulled up his stool and looked me over carefully, lightly touching my skin here and there.
‘Because, my sweet girl, you are so very beautiful and that beauty deserves to be recorded for the world to see.’

Beautiful but impoverished Lina Dahlstrom is dying of tuberculosis and it seems that no one can save her. All hope is lost until an eccentric doctor, Carl Dance, becomes enthralled with Lina’s charms and vows to do everything in his power to cure her. But when the illness inevitably claims Lina’s life, Dance’s obsession with her only grows and so begins a mad and criminal scheme to bring her back from beyond the grave and claim her as his own forever.

Set in Stockholm in 1930 and based on true events, Exquisite Corpse is a story about the madness and horror of a romance that knows no bounds.

Marija Peričić is a writer based in Melbourne. Her first novel, The Lost Pages, won The Australian/Vogel’s Literary Award 2017 and was shortlisted for the 2017 Readings Prize for New Australian Fiction. She was named as a 2018 Sydney Morning Herald Best Young Australian Novelist. Exquisite Corpse is her second novel.