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Dutton

A Language of Limbs

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Title
Title: A Language of Limbs
Author: Dylin Hardcastle
ISBN: 9780593852712
Publisher: Dutton
Published: 2025
Binding: Hardcover
Language: English
Number of Pages: 304
Condition Note: New from the publisher
Publisher Description: One of TIME's 100 Must-Read Books of 2025

"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.