- A LANGUAGE OF LIMBS -
The first love of a teenage girl is a powerful thing, particularly when the object of that desire is her best friend, also a girl. It's the kind of power that could implode a family, a friendship, a life. On a quiet summer night in Newcastle, 1972, a choice must be made: to act upon these desires, or suppress them? To live an openly queer life, or to try desperately not to?
Over the following three decades, these two lives almost intersect in pivotal moments, the distance between them at times drawing so thin they nearly collide. Against the backdrop of an era including Australia's first Mardi Gras and the AIDS pandemic, we see these two lives ebb and flow, with joy and grief and loss and desire, until at last they come together in the most beautiful and surprising of fashions.
A Language of Limbs is about love and how it's policed, friendship and how it transcends, and hilarity in the face of heartbreak - the jokes you tell as you're dying and the ways laughing at a funeral softens the edges of our grief. An unashamed celebration of queer life in all its vibrancy and colour, this story finds the humanity in all of us, and demands we claim our futures for ourselves.
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'And then, just like that, a thought bubbles inside me. It's a beginning; a new beginning; my beginning. The beginning of the story I tell myself in order to survive.
We choose to breathe, don't we?'
Below Deck is about the moments that haunt us, the moments that fan out like ripples through the deep. So that everything else, becomes everything after.
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'Lyrical, profound, and deeply moving Sophie Hardcastle's Below Deck will confront as well as soothe, and is the most tender, hopeful battle-cry of a book.'
- Brooke Davis
'Hardcastle has captured the powerful words so many of us struggle to find, and I cannot imagine anyone could finish Below Deck unaffected.'
- Bri Lee
'Below Deck will leave you breathless. Hardcastle is a phenomenal, courageous talent.'
- Clementine Ford
'An emotional novel from one of the country's brightest young talents.'
- Sydney Morning Herald.
Paperback and ebook published by Hachette Australia.
Audiobook published by Bolinda Audio.
Available from your local Australian or New Zealand bookstore, or online retailer.
Available internationally as an ebook or audiobook. Search on Kindle, iTunes, iBooks, Audible, Amazon and Borrow Box.
'Written with raw honesty, immediacy and heart-felt lyricism, Hardcastle's tale is one that will resonate deeply with young people in particular.'
- Sydney Morning Herald.
Paperback and ebook published by Hachette Australia.
Audiobook published by Bolinda Audio.
Available from your local Australian or New Zealand bookstore, or online retailer.
Available internationally as an ebook or audiobook. Search on Kindle, iTunes, iBooks, Audible, Amazon and Borrow Box.