WEB ORDERS ARE NOW CLOSED – we regret that we have had to suspend web orders until the Covid-19 social distancing precautions are no longer necessary.
A group of friends moves into a share house in Redfern. They are all on the cusp of thirty and big life changes, navigating insecure employment and housing, second-generation identity, online dating and social alienation—and one of them, our narrator, has just lost her father.
How do you inhabit a space where the landscape is shifting around you, when your sense of self is unravelling? What meaning does time have in the midst of grief?
Through emotionally rich vignettes tinged with humour, Friends & Dark Shapes sketches the contours of contemporary life. It is a novel of love and loss, of constancy and change. Most of all, it is about looking for connection in an estranged world.
INTERVIEWS and REVIEWS
ABC Radio National: The Bookshelf
andFriends & Dark Shapes
‘Such a vivid geography: this is a work of smart intensities, witty sorrow and wise coming-to-terms with grief. Astute, wry and beautifully tender.’
‘Kavita Bedford gives the gift of brighter eyes. Her prose is sparse yet jewelled, a desert of out-of-the-blue opals and oases.’
‘Friends & Dark Shapes is an achingly relatable, thought-provoking and compelling debut, full of gorgeous sentences that stopped me in my tracks…I loved every minute of it.’
‘Friends & Dark Shapes smells and feels and tastes like Sydney, like grief, like the limbo and the lucidity of your twenties. Bedford’s poetic yet sparse, fearless yet gentle prose makes this a book to be savoured.’
‘An astonishingly assured debut, full of razor-sharp observations about what it means to live precariously in a changing city. It’s hard to believe this is Bedford’s first novel. Her voice is already fully formed.’
‘Friends & Dark Shapes is a tender look at the myriad ways that a body can hold grief. Kavita Bedford writes lyrically and longingly, imbuing sweetness and darkness throughout. It was a genuine pleasure to read this book; I felt as though I were sitting with a close friend, whispering to each other, sharing close-kept secrets. It made me rethink how loneliness can manifest; how we sometimes hurt ourselves and each other. Friends & Dark Shapes is a real delight and Kavita Bedford is a true talent.’
