'I had a body once before. I didn't always love it. I knew the skin as my limit, and there were times I longed to leave it. I knew better than to wish for this.
'This is the story of Yun. It's the story of Adam. Two young people. A familiar chase.
'But this is not a love story. It's a story of revenge, transformation, survival. Feel something, the body commands. Feel this. But it's a phantom . . . I go untouched.
'They want their body back.
'Who are we, if we lose hold of the body? What might we become?
'The Airways shifts between Sydney and Beijing, unsettling the boundaries of gender and power, consent and rage, self and other, and even life and death.
A powerful, inventive, and immersive novel from award-winning author Jennifer Mills.' (Publication summary)
'A ghost story about boundaries, contamination, and the porous corporeality of existence.'
At Home with Jennifer Mills
Astrid Edwards
(interviewer),
2021
23448370
2021
single work
podcast
interview
'Jennifer Mills is the author of the novels The Airways, Dyschronia, Gone and The Diamond Anchor, as well as a collection of short stories, The Rest Is Weight. In 2019 Dyschronia was shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Literary Award, Australia’s most prestigious prize for literary fiction, the Adelaide Festival Awards for Literature, and the Aurealis Awards for science fiction.' (Production introduction)
'The Airways is Jennifer Mills’ third novel and ranges from Sydney to Beijing as it explores themes of infection and the banality of violence.'
'Occasionally a book arrives that is so strange, so obscure, so crouched and brooding and – in the final analysis – mystifying, that you cannot begin to know what to make of it. Exhibit A: Jennifer Mills’ The Airways.' (Introduction)
'Miles Franklin-shortlisted author’s new novel follows a ghost who can inhabit different bodies in a reflective take on the genre'
'There is something, or rather someone, in the air in Jennifer Mills’s dark fourth novel. The Airways represents another leap towards the uncanny for Mills, whose previous book, the Miles Franklin-shortlisted Dyschronia (2018), was already a departure from the more traditionally realist modes of her earlier novels, The Diamond Anchor (2009) and Gone (2011), and short story collection, The Rest Is Weight (2012).' (Introduction)
At Home with Jennifer Mills
Astrid Edwards
(interviewer),
2021
23448370
2021
single work
podcast
interview
'Jennifer Mills is the author of the novels The Airways, Dyschronia, Gone and The Diamond Anchor, as well as a collection of short stories, The Rest Is Weight. In 2019 Dyschronia was shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Literary Award, Australia’s most prestigious prize for literary fiction, the Adelaide Festival Awards for Literature, and the Aurealis Awards for science fiction.' (Production introduction)
