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A Novel
by Dylin Hardcastle
A breathtaking, sliding-doors, will-they-won't-they love story and a tender epic that explores the weight of a choice, the love of community and how joy is found in even the darkest corners.
Newcastle, Australia, 1972. On a sticky summer night, a choice must be made: To give in to queer desire or suppress it? To venture into the unknown or stay the course? In alternating chapters, we trace the two versions of a life that follow.
In one, a teenage girl is caught kissing her neighbor and is kicked out from her home. She lands at a queer communal home in Sydney called Uranian House, where she meets the people who will forever become her family. Meanwhile, in the second, a teenage girl pushes down her lustful dreams of her best friend and eventually makes her way to a university in Sydney to study English literature.
During pivotal moments, the physical space between these two women closes—like when they each meet the first great loves of their lives in 1977 at a protest, or when, almost a decade later, they are both rushed to the hospital with only a curtain between them. Through the AIDS crisis—and from classrooms to art galleries, beds to bars and hospitals to homes—we witness these two lives shadow each other until, finally and poignantly, they collide.
"Hardcastle handily crafts two distinct voices for the alternating story lines, revealing the ripple effects of choosing one path over another. It's a captivating display of how one decision can shape a life." —Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"Vivid and poignant, with flashes of the experimental and poetic, the novel serves as a record of queer life in Australia in the '70s and '80s and asks us to consider how and why we love." —Booklist
"A Language of Limbs is a queer novel in vital, masterful conversation with itself, and Hardcastle's visceral, propulsive prose inexorably and generously draws the reader into this conversation—about the violence of metamorphosis, the joyful confusion between self and other, and all the ways we strive to create meaning on the spectrum between chance and destiny. This book will stay with you." —Olivia Wolfgang-Smith, author of Mutual Interest
"A Language of Limbs is an ecstatic world of a queer love story. Hardcastle's vivid prose transported me to a queer past and future rooted in community and love, even amid grief. Sprawling yet exquisitely intimate." —Jules Ohman, author of Body Grammar
This information about A Language of Limbs was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Dylin Hardcastle (they/them) is an award-winning author, artist, and screenwriter. They are the author of Below Deck (2020), Breathing Under Water (2016), and Running Like China (2015). Their work has been published to critical acclaim in eleven territories and translated into eight languages. A Language of Limbs won the Kathleen Mitchell Award through Creative Australia. The novel has been optioned by Curio (Sony Pictures) and is in development.
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