Set across two days and nights in late-1950s Melbourne, Beverley Farmer’s debut novel circles the feverish interior life of a young woman after the collapse of a relationship with another woman.

Estranged from her family, having left university and drifting through a city that feels alternately hostile and unreal, she moves haphazardly, trying to make sense of the fact that another person has become the organising principle of her emotional world. 

The prose is very Giramondo, it slips into poetry, dialogue, remembered speech and dramatic monologue, so that the novel feels less narrated than inhabited. The language catches obsession at its least dignified and most exacting—circular, theatrical, bodily, self-lacerating—while the surrounding Melbourne of boarding houses, universities, streets and casual misogyny continually presses against the narrator’s private crisis. First published in 1980 and long out of print, Alone now reads as both an unusually raw account of queer desire and an early statement of Farmer’s interest in consciousness, solitude and the unstable border between experience and language.

Giramondo Publishing Company, Artarmon, NSW, 2024. First Giramondo edition; first published by Sisters Publishing in 1980. Paperback. Very light shelf wear only; internally clean and unmarked, binding firm.