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 made: 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.
Format: Paperback
Pages: 304
Imprint: Picador Australia
Publication date: 25/06/2024
A Language of Limbs
by Dylin Hardcastle
Review by Rosa
This book absolutely destroyed me- it is so, so special. Moving seamlessly across time and space, A Language of Limbs sews together two experiences of queerness; one embraced and one repressed, both equally as devastating. Alongside these ‘limbs’ are a chorus of characters who captured my heart as soon as they traced the page. Their pasts loom over them yet they manage to forge their own family and exude joy, vibrancy, and above all, a will to keep on living and to let love win. The integration of elements of queer history including the heartbreak of the AIDS crisis made me hugely grateful for the people who passed before us and fought for the fact that queer love and queer joy are to be celebrated and not chastised.
I genuinely feel so lucky that I crossed paths with Dylin Hardcastle’s work and that I could hold their beautiful words in my hands. They made me cry both happy and sad tears, reminded me of the beauty and brutality of language and living, and reinforced the reason why I love to read so much. I struggle to find the words for this book, I cannot recommend it highly enough.
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