![]() ![]() ![]() The novel follows Kerry Salter as she careens into her rural New South Wales home town on a stolen motorbike to see her grandfather. By turns elegantly descriptive and exquisitely affronting, Too Much Lip describes a family in perpetual crisis: fractured, addicted, abused and abusive, absent and broken. Too Much Lip was also shortlisted for the 2019 Stella prize. Her writing is as varied as her characters for whom identity is never singular or simple. Lucashenko evokes a sense of deep recognition of this country’s language, landscape and place with her prose. More than anything, as a white lady from North Queensland, this story is both for me and not. It is both literary and pulp fiction, high culture and low. Lucashenko is writing what can be described as the postmodern Indigenous Australian novel, and Too Much Lip will appeal broadly to readers of Australian fiction, smart and politically minded rural and romance titles, and Indigenous fiction. But the stakes change, and Kerry finds herself fighting to save her family’s land, burial grounds, history and connection to home. After an armed robbery gone awry, Kerry returns to her hometown to say farewell to her dying Pop. ![]() ![]() Central to the novel are themes of rage, incarceration, and generational trauma. Title of Melissa Lucashenko’s latest book-both an accusation and a lament-speaks of hunger, greed, desperation, destruction and redemption. ![]()
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