A Language of Limbs

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. (June)