Too Much Lip
A Novel
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
A gritty and darkly hilarious novel quaking with life—winner of Australia’s Miles Franklin Award—that follows a queer, First Nations Australian woman as she returns home to face her family and protect the land of their ancestors.
Wise-cracking Kerry Salter has spent her adulthood avoiding two things: her hometown and prison. A tough, generous, reckless woman accused of having too much lip, Kerry uses anger to fight the avalanche of b******t the world spews. But now her Pop is dying and she's an inch away from the lockup, so she heads south on a stolen Harley for one last visit.
Kerry plans to spend twenty-four hours, tops, across the border. She quickly discovers, though, that Bundjalung country has a funny way of latching on to people—not to mention her chaotic family and the threat of a proposal to develop a prison on Granny Ava’s Island, the family’s spiritual home. On top of that, love may have found Kerry again when a good-looking white fella appears out of nowhere with eyes only for her.
As the fight mounts to stop the development, old wounds open. Surrounded by the ghosts of their Elders and the memories of their ancestors, the Salters are driven by the deep need to make peace with their past while scrabbling to make sense of their present. Kerry just hopes they can come together in time to preserve Granny Ava’s legacy and save their ancestral land.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
A dysfunctional Aboriginal family grapples with love, loss, and violence in Melissa Lucashenko’s spellbinding and darkly funny novel. When Kerry Salter rolls back into her hometown of Durrongo on a stolen Harley Davidson to say goodbye to her dying grandfather, she hopes it’ll be a quick visit. But when the town’s white mayor decides to turn the Salter family’s ancestral land into a prison, the horrified Kerry prepares for a fight to the death. We were blown away by Lucashenko’s ability to balance the heavy topics of colonial racism, generational trauma, and emotional abuse with witty humour, incorporating flashes of Bundjalung language. Too Much Lip transports us to the gorgeous, sweltering desert vistas of Australia’s west coast for a heartrending and hilarious tale.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
A daughter gets caught in her Aboriginal Australian family's complicated legacy in Indigenous Australian writer Lucashenko's darkly funny U.S. debut. With 33-year-old Kerry Salter's girlfriend in jail after a bipolar episode culminating in armed robbery, Kerry rides her motorcycle from Sydney to her small hometown of Durrongo, New South Wales, to visit her terminally ill grandfather. During a trip to a favorite swimming spot on her family's ancestral land, Kerry learns crooked local official Jim Buckley plans to sell the land, which is owned by the state, to build a prison. Her older brother, washed-up soccer star Ken, launches a crusade to fight the land sale to soothe his rage over his younger brother, whom they call Black Superman, for getting ahead with a fancy government job in Sydney. An unexpected sexual relationship with a white man Kerry went to school with leads her to discover that her sister, Donna, who was presumed dead after going missing nearly 20 years ago, is in fact alive, passing for white, and working with Buckley. Kerry cajoles Donna into attending their mother's birthday party, where Donna explodes with a secret that fractures the family just as their feud with Buckley reaches a fever pitch. With strong voices and kinetic prose, Lucashenko's engrossing narrative speaks to the ongoing traumas of indigenous life in Australia. This deserves to make a splash.
