From the bestselling author of The Truth About Her comes Lonely Mouth, a delicious, clever, tender and vivid novel about the conflicted way women think about their bodies, their appetites, and themselves in the world.
'Lonely mouth ... It's a Japanese expression. It means, like, you feel like you want to eat something, but you don't know what it is. You're looking for just the right thing. But maybe there is no right thing. Maybe you don't need anything at all.'
Matilda and Lara are half-sisters who share an unreliable mother and a chaotic past. In every other way, though, they are very different from each other. Lara, ten years younger than Matilda, is a model, living and working in Paris—for her, life is expansive, carefree, beautiful. Matilda's life, in contrast, is solitary, contained, ordered. She works in one of Sydney's buzziest restaurants, Bocca, with an unrequited crush on her boss, celebrity chef Colson. If she's careful—and she always is—she can keep everything in its proper place. Hold the balance between hunger and satiation.
But when Lara's father, the long-absent, erratic Angus Dante, comes back into the sisters' lives to make amends for his past misdeeds, Matilda's compartmentalised life goes seriously awry. As everything blows apart, Matilda is forced to come to a reckoning with who she is, and how to satisfy the hunger she wants to deny.
From bestselling author Jacqueline Maley, Lonely Mouth is a tender, vivid and fiercely relatable novel about the conflicted way women think about their bodies, their appetites, and themselves in the world, about the loneliness of girls and women, and the way we believe ourselves to be worthy—or not—of love.
PRAISE FOR LONELY MOUTH
'Maley's writing is exquisite—lyrical, detailed and deeply immersive. Her ability to capture the smallest moments and intricate and character details make the world feel vivid and authentic ... Captivating.' Books+Publishing
'As a novelist, Maley turns her journalist's eye—sharp, steady—on the subcutaneous currents that pulse within women. Daughters, mothers, lovers, helpers, helped. She writes with such tenderness and care, it makes the heart ache, and her characters feel as touchable as skin. I loved this book.' Annabel Crabb
'Tender, acute, searing and funny, I devoured this novel. It's a coming-of-age novel and a Bildungsroman all at once—about the enormous effort of finding yourself when you start with bad odds—being abandoned as a child by your mother under the Big Merino at Goulburn. Maley's characters are so gloriously alive I felt I knew them. A beautifully structured novel about how desire—for food, for love, for meaning—can shape a life, if you can just be whole enough to tap into it.' Anna Funder
