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Text publishes a number of perfect book club reads. These are the stories that will engage you, challenge your thinking and prompt interesting debate. To help get the conversation flowing, download our book club notes for your next meeting.

Book of the Month

Bodies of Light

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

Bodies of Light

Jennifer Down

$32.99

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, 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.

’Brutal and beautiful – I couldn’t stop reading it. Jennifer Down is a brilliant writer.’ Victoria Hannan

Download the bookclub notes