The Book of Bruises by Dolly Sen

A limited signed print run of 100 copies

trigger warning: rape, violence, trauma

A Book of Bruises is an uncompromising work of fragmentary memoir, rage-poetry, and political testimony. Inspired by Fernando Pessoa’s The Book of Disquiet, Dolly Sen writes from inside pain that cannot be resolved, only spoken.

These pages gather the bruises left by childhood abuse, rape, disability, racism, queerness, state violence, and a society that demands silence in exchange for survival. Sen dismantles the myth of healing, questions the fetishisation of resilience, and refuses the politeness expected of the traumatised. Rage, here, is not spectacle or destruction—it is evidence. It is a record of boundaries crossed and lives discounted.

Moving between prose, manifesto, lyric fragments, and aphorism, A Book of Bruises interrogates mental health systems, family denial, climate collapse, and the slow violence of governments that strip dignity from the vulnerable.

This is not a book that offers comfort or redemption. It offers recognition. It asks what it means to remain human in a world that rewards cruelty, mediocrity, and indifference—and what it costs to keep loving, protesting, and speaking anyway.

REVIEWS

Written in blood red rage, this tortuous testimony makes tough reading. But we become witness to the deepest suffering of an abused child. And without witnesses to our pain, will we ever heal? Raw rage has every right to wreak havoc in a society that colludes in silence.
Julie McNamara, Theatre Director and Playwright

‘Dolly rips a gash in the veneer of respectability, showing us the depth of damage that abused children are expected to accept by society. Powerful, awful and beautifully visceral.' Dr Sandra Walker, Director

The Book of Bruises is a meditation on rage in a world seeking to silence and ignore anything and anyone who doesn’t fit in and comply. It is a life lived rawly and in pursuit of better for us all. Louise Kenward Writer, Artist, Psychologist.

‘This book deftly reveals the ugliness, cruelty, failure, and hypocrisy of the world... I read it in one go, and barely breathed until I had finished!’ Kane John Mills, Writer and Theatre Maker

'It is a first-hand account of the horrors that disability involves. Not about the horrors of living with impairment, but about the horrors of becoming fucked up in a world that would rather go about all the time pretending everything is okay, and that attempts to shut out the voices of those who are prepared to speak about its ugliness. ' Dr Colin Cameron, Professor and Author

A stunning piece of writing filled with enough thought provoking slogans, sentences & word imagery to fill a T-shirt shop for a year. Many Selves