Carrying
About
She’s serving.
She’s eating.
She’s . . . Carrying.
In this electrifying horror debut that’s equal parts funny and harrowing, a stealth trans woman desperate to maintain her picture-perfect life discovers that she’s seemingly—impossibly—pregnant.
Everything Martha’s wanted, she’s made for herself.
Meet Martha: perfect wife, perfect stepmother, perfect woman. She’s got an adoring husband who wants more kids with her, a loving stepdaughter who looks up to her, and a body to die for. She’s an absolute pro: Salon-quality blowouts at home? Done. Perfectly plated meals on the table every day? Effortless. Meticulously faked miscarriages so her husband won’t suspect the truth? Just hand over the Oscar now.
Martha is trans, so stealth even her family has no idea. She carved the woman she is out of the marble of a boy, and she’ll do whatever it takes to protect what she’s built. When a mysterious chronic illness and its debilitating symptoms threaten to upend her existence, she starts experimental treatments and gives in to her new, unsettling cravings. She’s even more shocked to discover that she’s undeniably, impossibly pregnant.
With her body changing rapidly outside of her control and her choices dwindling, Martha struggles to maintain the life she’s fought so hard to live while preparing for the motherhood she never thought she’d have.
Edited by Ruoxi Chen at Putnam and Katie Bowden at 4th Estate.
The Center for Fiction 2026 First Novel Prize Longlist
Praise for this book
Carrying ruined my weekend plans because I couldn’t put it down and couldn’t stop talking about it... Centered around one of the great antiheroes of contemporary fiction, Josephs’ wickedly funny novel is at once grotesque and picturesque... Carrying wrecked me and delighted me in equal measure, a balance that’s nearly impossible to pull off... Tens across the board. This book will probably make you trans.
Not sure I've ever experienced a wider range of emotions during a single read. Carrying is a totally original (stomach-turning, laugh-out-loud, horrifying, heartwarming) work of art.
Oscillating between sinister, sexy, and sardonic… Carrying features a fresh and freaky coat of paint to familiar themes in trans literature using the kind of body-horror and sharp wit that I crave when I’m looking for a fleshed out world to fall into.
Provocative and sharply original, Carrying is as unsettling as it is addictive. A body horror that pulls you in, disturbs you quietly, and doesn’t let you go. Samantha Josephs has a bold, singular voice.
Josephs does a great job of making Martha not only sympathetic, but justified . . . Carrying captivated me from the very first sentence and kept me reading throughout. The pacing was incredibly quick . . . This book is a true page turner that incorporates all of the elements of queer fiction, identity, women’s fiction, and horror into one. I would highly recommend this book for anyone looking for a deliciously repugnant story of being a woman.
Pitched as Rosemary’s Detransition, Baby, Samantha Josephs’s debut novel is a notable entry in the (unsurprisingly robust) canon of trans body horror literature. . . It’s a fun, nasty little romp, and Josephs deftly weaves the visceral horror of embodiment into the domestic drama at the center of the book. Read it, but not while you’re eating.
A fierce tour de force of terror. Carrying is a campy, erotic, provocative and utterly essential horror story for our time. It’s like The Substance meets Jane the Virgin but put a horny trans woman right at the centre. Samantha Josephs is the new horror it girl.
A diabolically unhinged ride! Buckle up. Carrying is a feisty, funny, and totally monstrous tale of a woman who will stop at nothing – and I mean nothing – for her miracle baby. Deliciously twisted.
Elegant, audacious, utterly unhinged - this is body horror at its most delicious.