A Language of Limbs

On a quiet night in 1972, two teenage girls each make a choice. One girl is caught kissing her best friend (also a girl) in her garden shed and is kicked out of home by her father. The other girl wakes from a sex dream she's had about her best friend (also a girl) who is sleeping over and decides to swallow it and all her messy feelings.

Over the following three decades, these two unnamed women almost intersect in pivotal moments, the physical distance between them at times drawing so thin that their bodies almost collide. One woman is living an openly queer life; one is trying desperately not to. Against the backdrop of milestones including Australia's first Mardi Gras and the AIDS pandemic, we see grief and joy live side by side until these characters finally come together.

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.

About the Author

Dylin Hardcastle is an author, artist and screenwriter. They are the author of three critically acclaimed books. Their first adult novel, Below Deck, was published in ten territories. Dylin is the co-creator, co-writer and co-director of the TV show Cloudy River. In 2018, they were a Provost's Scholar and a research assistant in World Literature at the University of Oxford. Dylin is currently completing their PhD in Creative Writing. Dylin has travelled to Antarctica, South America and Europe for artist residencies, and has exhibited their paintings widely across Australia and the UK. A Language of Limbs has been optioned and is in development with Curio (Sony Pictures).