Bodies of Light

In The Guardian Declan Fry concludes: "Bodies of Light is a remarkably empathic book, a bildungsroman in the mode of Jane Eyre or Of Human Bondage. Its characters are credibly invested with hopes, convictions, dreams, and desires."^[9]

Susan Midalia in the Australian Book Review notes that the book "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....Bodies of Light is at its most thought-provoking and emotionally engaging when it pauses in the rush of events to represent the intensity of Maggie’s psychological and bodily experiences."^[10]

• 2021 in Australian literature