The brilliant new short story collection from the Arthur C. Clarke Award-winning author of The Animals in That Country.
A family of cat farmers gets the chance to set the felines free. A group of chickens tells it like it is. A female-crewed ship ploughs through the patriarchy. A support group finds solace in a world without men.
With her trademark humour,energy,and flair,McKay offers glimpses of places where dreams subsume reality,where childhood restarts,where humans embrace their animal selves and animals talk like humans.
The stories in Gunflower explode and bloom in mesmerising ways,showing the world both as it is and as it could be.
Publisher: Scribe PublicationsISBN: 9781915590343Dimensions: 198 x 129 x 15 mm
MEDIA REVIEWS
'Startling,beautiful,and dangerous. McKay is the brightest of talents. We're lucky to have her.'- Robbie Arnott,author of Limberlost
'Amidst a pile of shed skin and fur,McKay moulds a kaleidoscopic and horrifyingly real portrait of life at the fringes. By turns gritty,surreal,and absurd,Gunflower isn't afraid to weigh flesh on the scales of our own judgments,a delicate balancing act between life and death,connection and disconnection. Perhaps part Kelly Link and Ottessa Moshfegh,McKay delivers an assured follow-up to The Animals in That Country in her own singular voice that zeroes in on our anxieties and existential crises with deft and often poetic flair.'- Sequoia Nagamatsu,bestselling author of How High We Go in the Dark
'Gunflower is like a swarm of small earthquakes: nothing is steady anymore,and the world feels bigger,scarier,almost transcendent in its strangeness.'- Miles Allinson,author of In Moonland
'A fierce debut novel...Her writing about people is filthy,fresh,and funny; this is prose on high alert,hackles up and teeth bared in every sentence. The novel becomes both a stirring attempt to inhabit other consciousnesses and a wry demonstration of the limits of our own language and empathy.'- Justine Jordan,The Guardian
'This is a game-changing,life-changing novel,the kind that comes along right when you need it,and compels you to listen to its terrifying poetry. Compulsively readable and yet also pushing the boundaries of what is possible in terms of language and narrative,this is a brilliant and disturbing book that will make you rethink everything you thought you understood about non-human animal sentience and agency. I don't think any reader can ever forget a voice like Sue the dingo's - wise and obscene in equal measure. A triumph.'- Ceridwen Dovey,author of Only the Animals
'This is an absorbing and affecting book,and one to which I'm able to pay the highest compliment: that,in the days after finishing it,the world felt different to me,its animals not speaking but not silent either.'- Ben Brooker,The Australian Book Review
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