A small-press Australian novel with a blackened, art-school, analogue-media mood: cassette hiss, oil-and-dope air, old televisions, VHS, white walls and adolescent performance. 

The narrator moves through the residue of school, art, family, bodies, rooms, memory, and late-teen self-fashioning with a voice that feels both observational and slightly scorched. There’s a beautiful griminess to it, like the kind of book where smell matters, where texture matters, where the social world is atmosphere. People talk, smoke, record, pose, remember, misremember. It looks like a book about youth, art and intimacy, but the more interesting thing is how it handles self-consciousness: the body as something watched, rehearsed, hated, styled, corrected, abandoned, performed. 

Good for readers after contemporary Australian lit, queer/alt-adjacent small press fiction, art-school malaise, coming-of-age without the usual laminated sentiment, and books that smell faintly of old fabric, cigarettes, wet hair and bad decisions. 

Moist Books paperback, 2024. Good used condition. Light handling/shelf wear; clean, sharp copy overall.