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Image courtesy of publisher's website.
y separately published work icon Unsheltered single work   novel  
Issue Details: First known date: 2021... 2021 Unsheltered
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AbstractHistoryArchive Description

'As the resourceful, relentless Li tracks her lost daughter across a disintegrating country, the journey will test the limits of her trust, her hope and her love. Unsheltered will leave you wrung out and gasping.

'Relentlessly propulsive and profoundly moving, Unsheltered taps into some of our worst fears and most implacable motivations, marking the emergence of a fully-formed and urgent literary voice.

'Against a background of social breakdown and destructive weather, Unsheltered tells the story of a woman’s search for her daughter. Li never wanted to bring a child into a world like this but now that eight-year-old Matti is missing, she will stop at nothing to find her.

'As she crosses the great barren country alone and on foot, living on what she can find and fuelled by visions of her daughter just out of sight ahead, Li will have every instinct tested. She knows the odds against her: an uncompromising landscape, an indifferent system, time running out, and the risks of any encounters on the road. But the greatest obstacles of all might be her own uncertainty and the ghosts of her past. Because even if she finds her, how can she hope to shield Matti from what is to come?

'At times tender, at times terrifying, Unsheltered is an engrossing, unpredictable novel that keeps the reader in suspense all the way to the end. A brilliant feat of imagination that asks if our humanity is the only protection we have left, Unsheltered will affect you in ways a book hasn’t done in years.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

Notes

  • Dedication : 'For Leon and Franka, my best place'
  • Epigraph : 'This land, this red land, is us; and the flood years and the dust years and the drought years are us. We can't start again.' - John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath
  • Author's note : 'The setting of this novel is Australian but not Australia. Geography, distance and time have been altered, some things moved around and others invented entirely.'

Affiliation Notes

  • Preppers and Survivalism in the AustLit Database

    This work has been affiliated with the Preppers and Survivalism project due to its relationship to either prepping or prepper-inflected survivalism more generally, and contains one or more of the following:

    1. A strong belief in some imminent threat
    2. Taking active steps to prepare for that perceived threat

    • A range of activities not necessarily associated with ‘prepping’ take on new significance, when they are undertaken with the express purpose of preparing for and/or surviving perceived threats, e.g., gardening, abseiling.
    • The plausibility of the threat, and the relative “reasonable-ness” of the response, don’t affect this definition. E.g., if someone is worried about climate change and climate disasters, and they respond by moving from a riverbank location in Cairns, or to a highland region of New Zealand, this makes them a prepper. If someone else is worried about brainwashing rays from outer space, and they respond by making a tinfoil hat, that makes them a prepper. 

    3. A character or characters (or text) who self-identify as a ‘prepper’, or some synonymous/modified term: ‘financial preppers’, ‘weekend preppers’, ‘fitness preppers’, etc.

Publication Details of Only Known VersionEarliest 2 Known Versions of

    • Cammeray, Cremorne - Mosman - Northbridge area, Sydney Northeastern Suburbs, Sydney, New South Wales,: Simon and Schuster Australia , 2021 .
      image of person or book cover 1406428777115952406.jpg
      Image courtesy of publisher's website.
      Extent: 307p.p.
      Note/s:
      • Published 5 May 2021.
      ISBN: 9781761100758
Form: audiobook
    • Cammeray, Cremorne - Mosman - Northbridge area, Sydney Northeastern Suburbs, Sydney, New South Wales,: Simon and Schuster Australia , 2021 .
      image of person or book cover 5908498556252661285.jpg
      Image courtesy of publisher's website.
      Extent: 8 hours and 35 minutesp.
      Note/s:
      • Published May 5, 2021
      ISBN: 9781761100772

Works about this Work

Clare Moleta Unsheltered. Reviewed by Linda Godfrey Linda Godfrey , 2021 single work review
— Appears in: The Newtown Review of Books , August 2021;

— Review of Unsheltered Clare Moleta , 2021 single work novel

'Clare Moleta’s novel canvases big questions as a mother searches for her child in a hostile landscape.' 

Clare Moleta Unsheltered. Reviewed by Linda Godfrey Linda Godfrey , 2021 single work review
— Appears in: The Newtown Review of Books , August 2021;

— Review of Unsheltered Clare Moleta , 2021 single work novel

'Clare Moleta’s novel canvases big questions as a mother searches for her child in a hostile landscape.' 

Last amended 20 Jun 2024 12:19:16
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