Hovering

(Paperback)

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Description

The city was in the same place. But was it the same city

Alice stands outside her family's 1950s red brick veneer, unsure if she should approach. It has been sixteen years, but it's clear she is out of options.

Lydia opens the door to a familiar stranger - thirty-nine, tall, bony, pale. She knows her sister immediately. But something isn't right. Meanwhile her son, George, is upstairs, still refusing to speak, and lost in a virtual world of his own design.

Nothing is as it was, and while the sisters' resentments flare, it seems that the city too is agitated. People wake up to streets that have rearranged themselves, in houses that have moved to different parts of town. Tensions rise and the authorities have no answers. The internet becomes alight with conspiracy theories.

As the world lurches around them, Alice's secret will be revealed, and the ground at their feet will no longer be so firm.

A spectacular debut novel from one of Australia's most exciting new writers. Winner of the Victorian Premier's Unpublished Manuscript Award, Hovering crosses genres, literary styles and conventions to create a powerful and kaleidoscopic story about three people struggling to find connection in a chaotic and impermanent world.

'Every now and then a book comes along that resists a neat definition. Hovering is just such a read . . . this fascinating, compelling novel will challenge readers' Good Reading

'in the mould of Jennifer Egan or AM Homes . . . [a] slick debut' The Guardian

'Original and blackly funny' Toni Jordan, The Age

'transformative' ArtsHub

'immediately striking on both a conceptual and a formal level' Sydney Morning Herald

'This is such an original novel, and Davis's writing is exhilarating, surprising but never heavy-handed . . . one of the most exciting books of this year' Kill Your Darlings

'a compassionate, surreal, clear-eyed exploration of modern Australia and the place of art in the national conversation' PS News

Author Bio

Rhett Davis is from the Wadawurrung country of Geelong and its nearby coastal towns. He has published in places like The Big Issue, Meanjin and The Sleepers Almanac. In 2015, he completed an MFA in Creative Writing at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. Hovering was written as part of a PhD at Deakin University and won the Victorian Premier's Literary Award for an Unpublished Manuscript in 2020. Rhett has lived in several places but always finds his way back to Geelong, where he lives with his partner and two talkative cats.