Jennifer Down

Jennifer Down cements her status as a leading light of Australian literary fiction in this heart-rending and intimate saga of one woman’s turbulent life

Bodies of Light

All night Audrey woke again and again, and every so often Nick would be awake, too, and their bodies would shift into new shapes, and once Nick reached for her as if in a panic, and once Audrey thumped to the kitchen half-awake and stuck her head under the tap to drink, and once she turned over to face Nick, who was open-eyed, and they began to kiss in a dream, bodies just coming to, and she saw the dull shadows from the streetlights pass over his face as he came, and he covered her body with his and she felt his breath in her hair, and they held each other, and the whole time they never said a thing. Audrey, Katy and Adam have been friends since high school—a decade of sneaky cigarettes, drunken misadventures on Melbourne backstreets, heart-to-hearts, in-jokes. But now Katy has gone. And without her, Audrey is thrown off balance: everything she thought she knew, everything she believed was true, is bent out of shape. Audrey’s family—her neurotic mother, her wayward teenage brother, her uptight suburban sister—are likely to fall apart. Her boyfriend, Nick, tries to hold their relationship together. And Audrey, caught in the middle, needs to find a reason to keep going when everything around her suddenly seems wrong. Evocative and exquisitely written, Our Magic Hour is a story of love, loss and discovery. Jennifer Down’s remarkable debut novel captures that moment when being young and invincible gives way to being open and vulnerable, when one terrible act changes a life forever.

Our Magic Hour

The characters in Jennifer Down’s Pulse Points live in small dusty towns, glittering exotic cities and slow droll suburbs; they are mourners, survivors and perpetrators. In the award-winning ‘Aokigahara’, a young woman travels to the sea of trees in Japan to say goodbye. In ‘Coarsegold’, a woman conducts an illicit affair while her recovering girlfriend works the overnight motel shift in the middle of nowhere. In ‘Dogs’, Foggo runs an unruly gang of bored, cruel boys with a scent for fresh meat. In ‘Pressure Okay’ a middle-aged man goes to the theatre, gets a massage, remembers his departed wife, navigates the long game of grief with his adult daughter. Jennifer Down, whose first novel, Our Magic Hour, was commended in the 2017 Victorian Premier’s Literary Award, is a masterly stylist whose sharp eye has been compared to that of Helen Garner. Pulse Points is a gutting collection that showcases her singular voice, and reminds us once more that this is a writer of great talent.

Stories

Pulse Points

Dan Gunn

Dennis Paphitis

From the revered Australian skincare company Aesop, a debut volume presenting its rigorous passion for creating superlative products and their considered approach to design. Since the founding of Aesop in 1987, its stores, products, and culture have been the expression of a complex, holistic set of carefully considered codes and principles. For the very first time within a book, the enigmatic brand documents the singular vision from which it was borne and the company customs that have allowed it to flourish. The volume includes recollections of the early formative days of Dennis Paphitis's hair salon and the first Melbourne store, tracing how and when Aesop's distinct approach to retail hospitality and its meticulous formulations were conceived. It ranges from the cohesion of the brand through to early packaging, iconography, and campaigns, without neglecting the more imperceptible codes that serve to unite all its stores and entice customers into them in over twenty regions around the world. What emerges is how Aesop's identity is a compound of its history and its singularity. The book also evokes the company's many inspirations: its fascination with the written word, the architects who have added their singular perspectives, and the partners and collaborators who have helped make Aesop so much more than simply a skincare company. Composed with photographs by the celebrated Japanese photographer Yutaka Yamamoto, this luxurious volume--an aesthetic handbook of sorts--argues the wisdom and intelligence of doing things well, doing them differently, and doing them for the long term.

Jennifer Down

About

Books

Join the club