AustLit

'“At night I lay in bed and counted the bodies I’d left behind … I pictured them all laid out in a paddock like human dominos. I had no way of knowing what happened to any of them.”' (Introduction)

'Australian novelist and short story writer Jennifer Down has been rightly acclaimed, with an impressive list of awards to her name, including the Jolley Prize in 2014. Her new novel, Bodies of Light, is both much more ambitious in scope than her first and an altogether more harrowing read. Spanning the years from 1975 to 2018, and traversing many different locations in Australia, New Zealand, and America, the novel confronts us with child sexual abuse, a suicide attempt, a series of fractured relationships, allegations of infanticide, recurring social alienation, and a serious drug addiction. But it is also, and mercifully, a story of a woman’s remarkable resilience, the possibility of human kindness, and the necessity of hope. Bodies of Light thus has affinities with the feminist Bildungsroman popularised in the 1960s and 1970s; a genre that championed a belief in productive self-fashioning by women in the face of systemic misogynistic oppression.' (Introduction)

'It’s rare an author who can turn trauma into beauty. It requires immense skill and depth to navigate an authentic rendering of experience without indulging in the emotions you want your reader to connect to. To move them past the horror of description into further realisation beyond the visceral.' (Introduction)