A Language of Limbs
A Novel
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- Pre-Order
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- Expected Jun 3, 2025
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
"The prose is textured, viscous almost, an ooze of sweet honey shot through with golden light . . . A Language of Limbs is a novel of (impeccable) vibes and mood, a gay hymnal written from inside the guts of the two protagonists."
—Yves Rees, Australian Book Review
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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Hardcastle's stunning debut follows a 15-year-old girl in 1972 Australia across two alternate timelines: one where she embraces her queerness and one where she rejects it. In the former version, the unnamed narrator is beaten by her father and kicked out of her home after her parents catch her having sex with her best friend. She's rescued from living on the street by a man named Dave, who affectionately nicknames her Little Dave and invites her into his queer found family. As the years pass, she's surrounded by joy and learns to accept herself despite such bitter injustices and catastrophes as AIDS, which ravages Dave's household. In the second timeline, the narrator suppresses her feelings for her best friend and sabotages their friendship by dating a boy. After university, she falls in love a writer named Thomas and they move in together. Though she's happy with how easy it is to conform to a conventional life, she remains troubled by her lingering feelings for women, and her life with Thomas is surprisingly and tragically upended by the AIDS crisis. 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.
