The Surviving Cells

Present-day Minneapolis. Dr Ana Jovanovic, oncologist, goes against the advice of her hospital's tumour board and schedules her patient Jonathan for exploratory surgery. She is proved right when the surgery reveals that he has cancer. But when tragedy strikes, Ana is sent into a tailspin. She takes an unplanned sabbatical, hoping to rediscover herself outside her dual, devouring roles of doctor and mother to fifteen-year-old Maggie. Now sharply aware of her own mortality, the doctor is confronted with decisions about quality of life and quality of death.


About the Author :

Brian Willems was born in Minnesota, and now lives and works in Croatia, teaching literature at the University of Split and serving as director of its Studia Mediterranea centre. Brian’s poetry and prose have appeared in The Antioch Review, Poetry Salzburg Review, Things Magazine, Prague Literary Review and elsewhere. He is the author of the experimental novella Henry, Henry (2016), as well as several academic books, most recently Sham Ruins: A User's Guide (2022), and is co-editor, with Nicol Barria-Asenjo and Slavoj Žižek, of Global Manifestos for the 21st Century, with a foreword by Yanis Varoufakis (2023). He translates from Croatian into English, including work by Jurica Pavičić, and Luka Bekavac's Gallery of Fine Arts in Osijek: Studies, Ruins. He is co-editor of LOOK Editions, and has been a guest lecturer in the UK, USA, the Middle East, and continental Europe. The Surviving Cells is his first novel.  

Brian Willems was born in Minnesota, and now lives and works in Croatia, teaching literature at the University of Split and serving as director of its Studia Mediterranea centre. Brian’s poetry and prose have appeared in The Antioch Review, Poetry Salzburg Review, Things Magazine, Prague Literary Review and elsewhere. He is the author of the experimental novella Henry, Henry (2016), as well as several academic books, most recently Sham Ruins: A User's Guide (2022), and is co-editor, with Nicol Barria-Asenjo and Slavoj Žižek, of Global Manifestos for the 21st Century, with a foreword by Yanis Varoufakis (2023). He translates from Croatian into English, including work by Jurica Pavičić, and Luka Bekavac's Gallery of Fine Arts in Osijek: Studies, Ruins. He is co-editor of LOOK Editions, and has been a guest lecturer in the UK, USA, the Middle East, and continental Europe. The Surviving Cells is his first novel.  

‘In The Surviving Cells, bureaucratic bullshit will pollute the best of intentions. But love is everywhere as well, sprouting like an invasive plant. Brian Willems’ close tracking of a vivid consciousness that (without warning) begins to lose access to external reality is both heartbreaking and stunning. I cannot stop thinking about this book.' – Dodie Bellamy, author of When the Sick Rule the World 

‘At the heart of Brian Willems’s novel The Surviving Cells lies cancer, a disease that drives the narrative like an invisible force: turning fates, shifting perspectives, erasing boundaries, and transforming relationships. The doctor becomes the patient and time, once abundant, suddenly grows scarce. The barrier between the one who heals and the one who suffers rises only to disappear. 
     ‘Through a series of such reversals, the narrator guides the story with surgical precision, cutting through illusions to reach the very core. But cancer is not merely a disease of the body. It is also a metaphor: a mutation spreading through society, from a repressive system that determines the fate of migrants to the conversion of terminal conditions into profit.  
     ‘Do we have any control at all, even over our own bodies? Does our life depend on a chain of fragile, invisible decisions? 
     ‘This novel offers no simple answers. Instead, it leads us through the labyrinth of the fragile body, posing questions that feel almost terminal themselves. In a world where unpredictability and precarity are its only constants, literature finds what medicine cannot: a space beyond cells. Although cancer fuels this story, it does not have the final word.’ – Maša Kolanović, winner of the European Prize for Literature and author of Underground Barbie 

‘The Surviving Cells is a highly personal, detailed, and meticulous novel about the unbearable complexity of care. It reminds us that survival is never simple, nor the risks we take when helping others to do so. After reading it, you'll never see medicine – or love – the same way again.’ – Susan Finlay, author of The Jacques Lacan Foundation 

‘A taut and utterly unflinching examination of the drivers behind modern medical research, and the multitude of ways us humans respond to the often brutal experience of serious illness. Realistic, compelling, and unsparingly honest.’ – Lori Inglis Hall, author of The Shock of the Light 

‘The Surviving Cells haunted me long after I finished reading it, returning me to my uneasy body, knowing I will be death’s subject, if not now, then when… It is a book about bodies, inside and out, container and contained; about the border line between the heart of one’s being and the strangeness of each decentred subject – that which is radically unassimilable. It asks how we might live and how we might die when confronted with a finite limit, the ethics of assuming mortality. It is also dryly witty, like Ana herself. I am re-reading it already.' – Sharon Kivland, author of These Are Addressed to You 

‘In The Surviving Cells, bureaucratic bullshit will pollute the best of intentions. But love is everywhere as well, sprouting like an invasive plant. Brian Willems’ close tracking of a vivid consciousness that (without warning) begins to lose access to external reality is both heartbreaking and stunning. I cannot stop thinking about this book.' – Dodie Bellamy, author of When the Sick Rule the World 

‘At the heart of Brian Willems’s novel The Surviving Cells lies cancer, a disease that drives the narrative like an invisible force: turning fates, shifting perspectives, erasing boundaries, and transforming relationships. The doctor becomes the patient and time, once abundant, suddenly grows scarce. The barrier between the one who heals and the one who suffers rises only to disappear. 
     ‘Through a series of such reversals, the narrator guides the story with surgical precision, cutting through illusions to reach the very core. But cancer is not merely a disease of the body. It is also a metaphor: a mutation spreading through society, from a repressive system that determines the fate of migrants to the conversion of terminal conditions into profit.  
     ‘Do we have any control at all, even over our own bodies? Does our life depend on a chain of fragile, invisible decisions? 
     ‘This novel offers no simple answers. Instead, it leads us through the labyrinth of the fragile body, posing questions that feel almost terminal themselves. In a world where unpredictability and precarity are its only constants, literature finds what medicine cannot: a space beyond cells. Although cancer fuels this story, it does not have the final word.’ – Maša Kolanović, winner of the European Prize for Literature and author of Underground Barbie 

‘The Surviving Cells is a highly personal, detailed, and meticulous novel about the unbearable complexity of care. It reminds us that survival is never simple, nor the risks we take when helping others to do so. After reading it, you'll never see medicine – or love – the same way again.’ – Susan Finlay, author of The Jacques Lacan Foundation 

‘A taut and utterly unflinching examination of the drivers behind modern medical research, and the multitude of ways us humans respond to the often brutal experience of serious illness. Realistic, compelling, and unsparingly honest.’ – Lori Inglis Hall, author of The Shock of the Light 

‘The Surviving Cells haunted me long after I finished reading it, returning me to my uneasy body, knowing I will be death’s subject, if not now, then when… It is a book about bodies, inside and out, container and contained; about the border line between the heart of one’s being and the strangeness of each decentred subject – that which is radically unassimilable. It asks how we might live and how we might die when confronted with a finite limit, the ethics of assuming mortality. It is also dryly witty, like Ana herself. I am re-reading it already.' – Sharon Kivland, author of These Are Addressed to You