Jamie Marina Lau

Monk lives in Chinatown with her washed-up painter father. When Santa Coy—possible boyfriend, potential accomplice—enters their lives, an intoxicating hunger consumes their home. So begins a heady descent into art, casino resorts, drugs, vacant swimming pools, religion, pixelated tutorial videos, and senseless violence. In bursts of fizzing, staccato and claustrophobic prose, this modern Australian take on the classic hard-boiled novel bounces you between pulverised English, elastic Cantonese and the new dialect of a digitised world. Tip over into a subterranean noir of the most electronic generation.

Pink Mountain on Locust Island

Throughout a childhood spent moving between different countries, one thing was constant for Leen. The local shopping centre. Within those complexes the familiar landscape of logos, the bright lights, the climate controlled environment and the interactions between workers and customers never changed. It all looked shiny, new and tidy - on the surface. So, when it feels like the same day for far too long, Leen decides to open a healing studio - ear-cleaning, massage and cupping - for her, the Par Mars Topic Heights shopping complex is the perfect location to build a business. A place where you can smell summer even if it happens to be winter. Here, Leen thinks she is making connections. Just like in the ancient Chinese art of ear-cleaning taught to her by her mother, she thinks what you can't see, you trust someone else to be able to. But what if you trust the wrong person? And what if that person is not looking to heal but to destroy? With a fierce intellect and masterful storytelling, Jamie Marina Lau brings to life a world that is devastatingly close to our own. A world where consumerism drives us to buy things we don't need, where otherness can be used to manipulate, where a person's worth is measured by the role they play or the way they look and where protective services isn't about protecting others from violence but viciously punishing those who step outside the lines. Gunk Baby is inventive, confronting and unforgettable.

Gunk Baby

'A tender horror story, all the more haunting for being so familiar . . . Lau's voice is cool, precise yet unfailingly human, taking aim at mall culture, work culture and consumer culture, and revealing them as excuses we whisper to ourselves as we lurch slowly towards a luxurious void' Roisin Kiberd, author of The Disconnect 'Jamie Marina Lau's sensibility is elliptical and it is unique; here is a new existence among the malls of instant consumerism' Alan Warner The suburbs of Par Mars. Two shopping centres, rows of estates and thematically designed neighbourhoods. Twenty-four-year-old Leen is going to open an ear-cleaning and massage studio in the Topic Heights Shopping Centre, taking her mother's Chinese ritual to the West to bring people back to their bodies. But something is not quite right in Par Mars. Managers are being attacked, and when Leen befriends Jean Paul, a pharmacist who is obsessed with a cryptic online forum, she finds herself involved in a community that is intent on disrupting the routines of capitalism in increasingly troubling ways. With a fierce intellect and masterful storytelling, Jamie Marina Lau brings to life a world that is devastatingly close to our own. Taking aim at consumerism and class, orientalism and the Zen movement, violence and middle-class boredom, GUNK BABY is inventive, unforgettable and from a voice younger, newer and more critical than most.

Jamie Marina Lau

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