Jacqueline Maley in conversation

Join us in-store for an evening with Jacqueline Maley to discuss Lonely Mouth, a delicious, clever, tender and vivid novel about the conflicted way women think about their bodies, their appetites, and themselves in the world. From the bestselling author of The Truth About Her, for fans of Blue Sisters and Sorrow and Bliss.

The in-conversation will be hosted by one of our experienced booksellers and begin at 6:30 pm with a short Q&A and signing to follow. This is a free event, but bookings are necessary so make sure to secure a ticket as capacity is limited!

Reserve a copy of Lonely Mouth here

About Lonely Mouth:

'Lonely mouth ... It's a Japanese expression. It means, like, you feel like you want to eat something, but you don't know what it is. You're looking for just the right thing. But maybe there is no right thing. Maybe you don't need anything at all.'

Matilda and Lara are half-sisters who share an unreliable mother and a chaotic past. In every other way, though, they are very different from each other. Lara, ten years younger than Matilda, is a model, living and working in Paris - for her, life is expansive, carefree, beautiful. Matilda's life, in contrast, is solitary, contained, ordered. She works in one of Sydney's buzziest restaurants, Bocca, with an unrequited crush on her boss, celebrity chef Colson. If she's careful - and she always is - she can keep everything in its proper place. Hold the balance between hunger and satiation.

But when Lara's father, the long-absent, erratic Angus Dante, comes back into the sisters' lives to make amends for his past misdeeds, Matilda's compartmentalised life goes seriously awry. As everything blows apart, Matilda is forced to come to a reckoning with who she is, and how to satisfy the hunger she wants to deny.

From bestselling author Jacqueline Maley, Lonely Mouth is a tender, vivid and fiercely relatable novel about the conflicted way women think about their bodies, their appetites, and themselves in the world, about the loneliness of girls and women, and the way we believe ourselves to be worthy - or not - of love.

Praise for Lonely Mouth:

'As a novelist, Maley turns her journalist's eye - sharp, steady - on the subcutaneous currents that pulse within women. Daughters, mothers, lovers, helpers, helped. She writes with such tenderness and care, it makes the heart ache, and her characters feel as touchable as skin. I loved this book.' Annabel Crabb

'Tender, acute, searing and funny, I devoured this novel. It's a coming-of-age novel and a Bildungsroman all at once - about the enormous effort of finding yourself when you start with bad odds - being abandoned as a child by your mother under the Big Merino at Goulburn. Maley's characters are so gloriously alive I felt I knew them. A beautifully structured novel about how desire - for food, for love, for meaning - can shape a life, if you can just be whole enough to tap into it.' Anna Funder

About the Author:

Jacqueline Maley is a Walkley and Kennedy Award-winning columnist and senior writer for the Sydney Morning Herald and Age newspapers, where she writes about politics, people and social affairs. Her bestselling debut novel, The Truth About Her, was shortlisted for the 2022 ABIA Literary Fiction Book of the Year and the Matt Richell Award for New Writer of the Year. She lives in Sydney with her daughter.