A Language of Limbs

A Novel

By: Dylin Hardcastle

Narrated by: Aisha Dee, Sonya Cullingford

Finalist for the Lambda Literary Award in Lesbian Fiction
One of TIME’s 100 Must-Read Books of 2025

"The prose is textured, viscous almost, an ooze of sweet honey shot through with golden light . . . A Language of Limbs is a novel of (impeccable) vibes and mood, a gay hymnal written from inside the guts of the two protagonists."
—Yves Rees, Australian Book Review

A breathtaking, sliding-doors, will-they-won’t-they love story and a tender epic that explores the weight of a choice, the love of community and how joy is found in even the darkest corners.
 
Newcastle, Australia, 1972. On a sticky summer night, a choice must be made: To give in to queer desire or suppress it? To venture into the unknown or stay the course? In alternating chapters, we trace the two versions of a life that follow.
 
In one, a teenage girl is caught kissing her neighbor and is kicked out from her home. She lands at a queer communal home in Sydney called Uranian House, where she meets the people who will forever become her family. Meanwhile, in the second, a teenage girl pushes down her lustful dreams of her best friend and eventually makes her way to a university in Sydney to study English literature.
 
During pivotal moments, the physical space between these two women closes—like when they each meet the first great loves of their lives in 1977 at a protest, or when, almost a decade later, they are both rushed to the hospital with only a curtain between them. Through the AIDS crisis—and from classrooms to art galleries, beds to bars and hospitals to homes—we witness these two lives shadow each other until, finally and poignantly, they collide.

NOT a sliding doors story

The description is misleading. I love a sliding doors story, where a person’s decisions or actions at any point may lead to very different outcomes. This is Not that. It is two almost completely unrelated people with unrelated stories. Which were pretty boring, especially the girl who goes hetero. The one who is true to her queer self is interesting but way overwritten. Purple prose. And you spend the Entire book waiting to see how their stories connect. Audible ought not to mislead readers like this.