A tragicomic debut by an impressive new voice.
A young mortuary cosmetologist seeks a balm for her own grief in the world of BDSM.
Amelia Aurelia loves her job. As the cosmetologist in the family-run Aurelia’s Funeral Parlour on the Australian coast, she is part of a well-oiled machine that seeks to provide burial services for the dead and the solace of a perfect funeral experience for the living. “As I brush makeup across Jennifer’s face,” Amelia thinks as she attends to a young woman who has committed suicide, “I wish I could tell her…how important it is for her people to see her like this, how they need to witness this image of her at peace before they can begin to feel peace themselves.” As good as she is at her job, however, Amelia knows that working so closely with grief takes an emotional toll that she seeks to address through daily, more-or-less anonymous sexual encounters with men who will “move [her] out of [her] head and into [her] body [and] fill [her] up with physical feeling to the point where emotions and thoughts [are] wrung out.” In this way, Amelia has created a fragile but working equilibrium, but when her wildly affectionate mother dies in a sudden accident, all of Amelia’s carefully built boundaries come tumbling down. Reeling with grief, she flees from her flamboyant stepfather, Vincent, her polyamorous brother, Simon, and her mother’s best friend, the irrepressible mortuary receptionist Judy, on the day before her mother’s funeral to stay with her emotionally distant biological father, Jack, at his isolated home in Tasmania. While there, Amelia falls into the BDSM scene, first as a sub taking part in an onstage pain scene, and then at the local kink club, the Widow Maker, where she begins her training as a domme. In both roles, Amelia struggles to manage her overwhelming grief as she moves through the rawest phases of her trauma and into the long, slow settling that comes after. At turns a rollicking sexual romp almost slapstick in its intensity and an existential meditation filled with the languid profundity of bodies at their final rest, this unusual novel navigates the most treacherous of emotional territories—the fault lines between love and grief, sex and death—with a deliberate lack of grace and real charm.
A tragicomic debut by an impressive new voice.Pub Date: Feb. 15, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-953387-12-7
Page Count: 212
Publisher: Two Dollar Radio
Review Posted Online: Dec. 14, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2022
BOOK REVIEW
A tender and moving portrait about the transcendent power of art and friendship.
An artwork’s value grows if you understand the stories of the people who inspired it.
Never in her wildest dreams would foster kid Louisa dream of meeting C. Jat, the famous painter of The One of the Sea, which depicts a group of young teens on a pier on a hot summer’s day. But in Backman’s latest, that’s just what happens—an unexpected (but not unbelievable) set of circumstances causes their paths to collide right before the dying 39-year-old artist’s departure from the world. One of his final acts is to bequeath that painting to Louisa, who has endured a string of violent foster homes since her mother abandoned her as a child. Selling the painting will change her life—but can she do it? Before deciding, she accompanies Ted, one of the artist’s close friends and one of the young teens captured in that celebrated painting, on a train journey to take the artist’s ashes to his hometown. She wants to know all about the painting, which launched Jat’s career at age 14, and the circle of beloved friends who inspired it. The bestselling author of A Man Called Ove (2014) and other novels, Backman gives us a heartwarming story about how these friends, set adrift by the violence and unhappiness of their homes, found each other and created a new definition of family. “You think you’re alone,” one character explains, “but there are others like you, people who stand in front of white walls and blank paper and only see magical things. One day one of them will recognize you and call out: ‘You’re one of us!’” As Ted tells stories about his friends—how Jat doubted his talents but found a champion in fiery Joar, who took on every bully to defend him; how Ali brought an excitement to their circle that was “like a blinding light, like a heart attack”—Louisa recognizes herself as a kindred soul and feels a calling to realize her own artistic gifts. What she decides to do with the painting is part of a caper worthy of the stories that Ted tells her. The novel is humorous, poignant, and always life-affirming, even when describing the bleakness of the teens’ early lives. “Art is a fragile magic, just like love,” as someone tells Louisa, “and that’s humanity’s only defense against death.”
A tender and moving portrait about the transcendent power of art and friendship.Pub Date: May 6, 2025
ISBN: 9781982112820
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: July 4, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
A welcome literary resurrection that deserves a place alongside Wright’s best-known work.
A falsely accused Black man goes into hiding in this masterful novella by Wright (1908-1960), finally published in full.
Written in 1941 and '42, between Wright’s classics Native Son and Black Boy, this short novel concerns Fred Daniels, a modest laborer who’s arrested by police officers and bullied into signing a false confession that he killed the residents of a house near where he was working. In a brief unsupervised moment, he escapes through a manhole and goes into hiding in a sewer. A series of allegorical, surrealistic set pieces ensues as Fred explores the nether reaches of a church, a real estate firm, and a jewelry store. Each stop is an opportunity for Wright to explore themes of hope, greed, and exploitation; the real estate firm, Wright notes, “collected hundreds of thousands of dollars in rent from poor colored folks.” But Fred’s deepening existential crisis and growing distance from society keep the scenes from feeling like potted commentaries. As he wallpapers his underground warren with cash, mocking and invalidating the currency, he registers a surrealistic but engrossing protest against divisive social norms. The novel, rejected by Wright’s publisher, has only appeared as a substantially truncated short story until now, without the opening setup and with a different ending. Wright's take on racial injustice seems to have unsettled his publisher: A note reveals that an editor found reading about Fred’s treatment by the police “unbearable.” That may explain why Wright, in an essay included here, says its focus on race is “rather muted,” emphasizing broader existential themes. Regardless, as an afterword by Wright’s grandson Malcolm attests, the story now serves as an allegory both of Wright (he moved to France, an “exile beyond the reach of Jim Crow and American bigotry”) and American life. Today, it resonates deeply as a story about race and the struggle to envision a different, better world.
A welcome literary resurrection that deserves a place alongside Wright’s best-known work.Pub Date: April 20, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-59853-676-8
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Library of America
Review Posted Online: March 16, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2021
BOOK TO SCREEN
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
