Vendor
	Fritz Agency Christian Dittus
Original language
English

DESIRE

Jessie Cole

A Reckoning

Jessie Cole has written an unabashed, thrilling exploration of the very nature of desire, a story about vulnerability and strength, loss, and regeneration. A memoir of the body, DESIRE is a visceral book in which feeling, and longing are laid bare.

What does it mean to be awakened? To want? To love? Jessie Cole is in her late thirties when she meets a man twenty years older than she is. They become lovers. Both passionate and companionable, fraught and uneven, their relationship tests her fears and anxieties. Through their interstate affair, through bushfires and the pandemic, she learns about herself, how her initiations into womanhood shaped who she is now, and how the shadow of family trauma still inhabits her body.

Jessie Cole is a writer. Her first novel, DARKNESS ON THE EDGE OF TOWN, was shortlisted for the 2013 ALS Gold Medal and longlisted for the Dobbie Literary Award. Her second novel, DEEPER WATER, was released in 2014 to critical acclaim. STAYING, a memoir, was longlisted for the 2019 Colin Roderick Award and shortlisted for the Victorian Premier's Literary Award for Non-Fiction. She lives in northern New South Wales

Available products
Book Published 2022-08-01 by Text Publishing

Comments

A gorgeous journey of a writer seeking out the inaccessible part of herself, of those she loves, and who love her back, and of the forest that holds them all together. DESIRE is a book of intellectual and emotional depth, exploring the flesh and nerves and sinew as a mother, a lover, a friend, and soothsayer. A tender joy of a book, about life and death, and of all the great pulls in between. Raw and fascinating writing that shimmers with truth and beauty at once. A confession, a lament, a celebration I cannot recommend this enough.' Tara June Winch, Miles Franklin Award winning author of THE YIELD

I read DESIRE in one sitting and haven't stopped thinking about it since. Jessie Cole has written a triumph of a book, unlike any other. You will see yourself on these brilliant pages, a lit-up version you thought you'd left hidden in the dark. They will call DESIRE brave and vulnerable, a tell-all. But really it is a gift, a risk, a body, a revelation of electric prose. Cole has written a love story. She has shown us what it looks like to believe yourself. -- Sarah Sentilles, author of STRANGER CARE: A MEMOIR OF LOVING WHAT ISN'T OURS