Young adult

There isn’t a neat ending to The Gaps, for a pat resolution would go against the grain of the book.

Right from its opening line: ‘The white boys stare at us from the pub’, this story brings its readers into the First Nations community of south coast of NSW and into the realm of Aboriginal protagonist Jackson on the cusp of adulthood.

I want to write an essay about Helena Fox’s remarkable Young Adult novel How It Feels To Float but I find myself distracted by the way that both reviewers and Young Adult literature advocates commonly talk about YA. I don’t want to talk about this book like that.

There is no place like home because home is not actually a place.

‘Speculative fictions like Sisters of No Mercy and Highway Bodies can help us to think in new ways about trans lives and families… They show that the infinitesimal choices of solidarity are ultimately life-saving: we can find meaning and security in the sharpened looks of our peers, in knowledge sharing and maneuvering and organising, and in self-belief.’

In 1989, I was an eighteen-year-old hopeful writer. I kept a black-and-red notebook for storing ideas, character sketches and exotic…