Description
June is searching for her old friend, Mae, missing in Greece. Working from Mae’s diaries, penned immediately prior to her disappearance, June travels to the island of Poros. Walking Mae’s last-known steps, June scrutinises the diaries alongside memories of an intense bond—long-gone, achingly present.
Blent is published under Spineless Wonders’ Espresso imprint.
Events
To be announced
Praise
Through her new work of fiction, Julia Prendergast expresses a deep connection to the power of words. Blent is a treasure, a gift to us from a writer with a generous relationship with readers. It is a privilege to be in her company, turning pages with her at our side.
—Tony Birch, novelist and poet
If ever the written form could embody the fragmented, charged, beautiful derangement of a life, this is it. A perfect tightrope walk of deft lyricism and story that had me glued to the page – a work that you taste and feel as profoundly as you take it in intellectually. A deeply lyrical work of eros, loss and salvage that gifts the reader a rare kind of pleasure in both language and story.
—Nicola Redhouse, writer-academic, author of Unlike the Heart: a memoir of brain and mind.
Julia Prendergast’s intensely lyrical, intensely personal Blent lands in the category of what Francois Camoin called “psychic autobiography”: frank about its roots in real life, it declares outright its refusal to distinguish between what “really happened” – as if we can ever know – and what events, if any, are invented. As the main character, June, searches a Greek island for her lost friend and lover, insights and memories flash upon her like lightning from dark, fast-moving clouds that can be observed but not entered. Such reticence at the heart of rough passion and unbearable loss is entirely in keeping with the book’s investigation into, around, through the fundamental unknowability of those we love: friends, lovers, children, parents. What clues – a coin, a shell, a journal – the narrative recovers prove illegible even written down in so many words. Perhaps like all of us, June finds only the multiplicity of every being that prevents us from deciphering even ourselves.
—Katharine Coles, Distinguished Professor of English, University of Utah
Thrilling and genre-defying, Blent is a haunting return to an unspeakable past. In electric prose, Julia Prendergast’s narrator is a modern-day Eurydice searching for an ending to her narrative. The “unwakeable incident” always looms large at the centre of memory, as the Aegean Sea pulses beneath the surface of the text, both beautiful and terrifying. In Blent, Prendergast reminds us of the “Kinetic energy of static selves” and that sometimes in the act of forgetting, we find the power to remember.
—Cassandra Atherton, Distinguished Professor of Writing and Literature, Deakin University
Tough love from Prendergast again. Clip up. Not for the faint of heart.
—Bruce Pascoe
Blent is both an intimate search for a missing friend and a fearless exploration of the selves that coil and fracture around love, desire, and care. I was reminded of Levy and Cusk, though Blent is entirely original, […] mesmerising in its precision—I felt like I was inside a nautilus shell.
—Rebekah Clarkson, author of Barking Dogs
Julia Prendergast’s Blent is an extraordinary rumination on the multiple selves that jostle within a complex personality—not only the collisions between the roles of lover, mother, friend and solitary artist, but the quest to locate past and elusive intimacies. Blent expresses the wildness that lives inside desire and want, probing the sometimes-fractured liminal spaces between language and feeling, and beautifully capturing poignant discrepancies between alternative ideas of how to live and be.
—Paul Hetherington, poet
Blent is a moving treatise on friendship, love, lust, motherhood, memory, loss. Julia Prendergast writes like a dream. Her turns of phrase are full of beauty and wisdom. What an achievement!
—Roanna Gonsalves, writer
Blent is an open wound of memories, mom guilt and a missing friend, somehow magicked into an entirely new language by Julia Prendergast.
—Shinie Antony, writer, Director, Bangalore Literature Festival
About the Author
JULIA PRENDERGAST’S debut collection, Bloodrust and other stories was published in 2022. Her novel, The Earth Does Not Get Fat (2018) was finalist in the Indie Book Awards for debut fiction. Her short stories have been recognised and published: Lightship Anthology International Short Story Competition (UK), Ink Tears International Short Story Competition, Glimmer Train International Short Story Competition (US), Séan Ó Faoláin International Short Story Competition, TEXT, Elizabeth Jolley Prize, Josephine Ulrick Prize.
Cover Artwork: Bettina Kaiser
Distribution inquiries:
Our titles are distributed by NewSouth Books through Alliance Distribution Services:
Tel: 02 4390 1300
Email: adscs@alliancedist.com.au
www.newsouthbooks.com.au
