Mixtape logic guides this novel’s shifts in time, voice, and feeling.

Set against the post-punk music scene of 1980s Melbourne and the everyday landscapes of the Blue Mountains, Sydney, and Castlemaine, Almost a Mirror tracks the lived intensity of memory, loss, and creative energy. Kirsten Krauth circles a cast of characters — Mona, Jimmy, Beñat — whose lives are shaped as much by the music they love as by the shapes of love and grief they carry forward. 

Krauth’s prose is attentive to the texture of youth, the stubborn pull of friendship and family, and the way creative life infuses ordinary experience with both sweetness and ruin.

Shortlisted for major Australian literary prizes and named among The Guardian’s top Australian books of 2020.