'Jennifer Down cements her status as a leading light of Australian literary fiction in this heart-rending and intimate saga of one woman's turbulent life
'So by the grace of a photograph that had inexplicably gone viral, Tony had found me. Or—he'd found Maggie.
'I had no way of knowing whether he was nuts or not; whether he might go to the cops. Maybe that sounds paranoid, but I don't think it's so ridiculous. People have gone to prison for much lesser things than accusations of child-killing.
'A quiet, small-town existence. An unexpected Facebook message, jolting her back to the past. A history she's reluctant to revisit- dark memories and unspoken trauma, bruised thighs and warning knocks on bedroom walls, unfathomable loss.
'She became a new person a long time ago. What happens when buried stories are dragged into the light?
'This epic novel from the two-time Sydney Morning Herald Young Novelist of the Year is a masterwork of tragedy and heartbreak-the story of a life in full. Sublimely wrought in devastating detail, Bodies of Light confirms Jennifer Down as one of the writers defining her generation.' (Publication summary)
Author's note: For Tom : wish you were here
and for Tasha : thanks for letting the light in.
'Bodies of Light, the 2022 Miles Franklin Literary Award winner, is a novel of contradictions. It is emotionally difficult to read, and yet the chapters fly by so quickly that one would swear it was a novella rather than a respectable tome of more than four hundred pages. Maggie's unrelenting pain paints a profoundly despondent world, and yet her dignified resilience leaves the afterimage of hope. The story revolves around deep connections to others, and yet its thesis suggests an inability to know another person. Jennifer Down has crafted a tale we cannot easily process or dismiss.' (Introduction)
'Jennifer Down’s Bodies of Light is a shattering novel, one that breaks and then rebuilds its readers. It has won the 2022 Miles Franklin Literary Award, the judges commending it as “a novel of affirmation, resilience and survival, told through an astonishing voice that reinvents itself from six to 60”.' (Introduction)
'“At night I lay in bed and counted the bodies I’d left behind … I pictured them all laid out in a paddock like human dominos. I had no way of knowing what happened to any of them.”' (Introduction)
'Australian novelist and short story writer Jennifer Down has been rightly acclaimed, with an impressive list of awards to her name, including the Jolley Prize in 2014. Her new novel, Bodies of Light, is both much more ambitious in scope than her first and an altogether more harrowing read. Spanning the years from 1975 to 2018, and traversing many different locations in Australia, New Zealand, and America, the novel confronts us with child sexual abuse, a suicide attempt, a series of fractured relationships, allegations of infanticide, recurring social alienation, and a serious drug addiction. But it is also, and mercifully, a story of a woman’s remarkable resilience, the possibility of human kindness, and the necessity of hope. Bodies of Light thus has affinities with the feminist Bildungsroman popularised in the 1960s and 1970s; a genre that championed a belief in productive self-fashioning by women in the face of systemic misogynistic oppression.' (Introduction)
'It’s rare an author who can turn trauma into beauty. It requires immense skill and depth to navigate an authentic rendering of experience without indulging in the emotions you want your reader to connect to. To move them past the horror of description into further realisation beyond the visceral.' (Introduction)
At Home with Jennifer Down
Astrid Edwards
(interviewer),
2021
23443253
2021
single work
interview
podcast
'Jennifer Down is a highly awarded writer, named a Sydney Morning Herald Young Novelist of the Year consecutively in 2017 and 2018. Her third long form work is 2021's Bodies of Light.
'Our Magic Hour, her debut novel, was shortlisted for the 2014 Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for an unpublished manuscript. Her second book, Pulse Points, was the winner of the 2018 Readings Prize for New Australian Fiction and the 2018 Steele Rudd Award for a Short Story Collection in the Queensland Literary Awards, and was shortlisted for a 2018 NSW Premier’s Literary Award.' (Production summary)
'This year’s Miles Franklin shortlist is lyrical in voice, complex in form, and perhaps a little more hopeful than usual. The threads of shared concern across the volumes leave me wondering whether there is something in the zeitgeist.' (Introduction)
'Jennifer Down’s Bodies of Light is a shattering novel, one that breaks and then rebuilds its readers. It has won the 2022 Miles Franklin Literary Award, the judges commending it as “a novel of affirmation, resilience and survival, told through an astonishing voice that reinvents itself from six to 60”.' (Introduction)
