A Language of Limbs

Dylin Hardcastle
4.35
4,029 ratings 974 reviews
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 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.
Genres: QueerFictionLGBTHistorical FictionLesbianLiterary FictionContemporaryBook ClubHistoricalAustralia
277 Pages

Community Reviews:

5 star
2191 (54%)
4 star
1247 (31%)
3 star
447 (11%)
2 star
114 (3%)
1 star
30 (1%)

Readers also enjoyed

Other books by Dylin Hardcastle

Lists with this book

Future Leaders of Nowhere
Requiem for Immortals
A Story of Now
Australian Lesbian Fiction
63 books24 voters
Ziggy, Stardust and Me
When They Burned the Butterfly
Wild Horses
Queer Books Set in the 1970s
52 books7 voters
Teddy
Insatiable
Luster
Maturing pains
25 books1 voters
Intermezzo
James
The Fury
Anticipated 2024 Literary Fiction
303 books92 voters