Friends & Dark Shapes

An exquisite examination of the contours of grief and contemporary life, from a fresh new Australian-Indian voice

The city I grew up in was elastic and belonged to me and my friends as we stretched it through the nights. We knew its contours, and when something new arrived we were among the first to be a part of it. Everything was powder pink and bendy and shiny for us. We hadn't had time to build a lasting memory around some fixture and then watch that time fall away from under us.

A group of friends moves into a share house in Redfern. They are all on the cusp of thirty and big life changes, navigating insecure employment and housing, second-generation identity, online dating and social alienation-and one of them, our narrator, has just lost her father.

How do you inhabit a space where the landscape is shifting around you, when your sense of self is unravelling? What meaning does time have in the midst of grief?

Through emotionally rich vignettes, tinged with humour, Friends & Dark Shapes sketches the contours of contemporary life. It is a novel of love and loss, of constancy and change. Most of all, it is about looking for connection in an estranged world.

About the Author

Kavita Bedford is a Sydney-based writer. Her writing has appeared in Guernica, the Guardian, Griffith Review and elsewhere. She has an MA of Applied Anthropology from Macquarie University, and was a recent Churchill Fellow. She works and teaches in media and global studies.