Hurdy Gurdy

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She tells me to sit down, says that she has something I need to hear and it's that they don't cut hair or set curls. Well they do sometimes, but not always, she says. She takes off her rubber glove and tosses it to the sink. We help them with a problem. We make it go away.

In a near-future Australia, the world has changed. A small circus caravan travels the countryside performing for dwindling audiences. Matriarch Queenie works outside the law, helped by high-diver Win, nineteen and yearning for love. By night, they gather under the dark sky joined by philosophical clown Valentina, and Girl, who they found at the side of the road. By day, they offer other services: hairdressing for women and a close shave for men. But while women come to them for help, men tend to disappear.


And in the distance, a reverend and his nun-like companion preach against alcohol, adultery and abortion. Two groups on an ideological collision course in a landscape altered by time and human error, while overhead a space mission has gone wrong.

Hurdy Gurdy sits alongside classics like The Handmaid's Tale, Station Eleven and The Natural Way of Things, and is a provocation; compelling and haunting. It's a feminist revenge tale about the choices that women have to make and asks the big questions:

Can beauty be found in times of great darkness


How do we go on

Author Bio

Jenny Ackland is an author, podcaster and teacher from Melbourne. Her short works have been listed in prestigious literary prizes and awards, such as the Bridport and Fish Prizes, as well as published in literary magazines, including Visible Ink, The Big Issue, Kill Your Darlings and the Sleepers Almanac. Jenny's received several writing residency fellowships including at Katharine Susannah Prichard in WA, and Varuna and Bundanon in NSW. Jenny is co-founder of Sex Education Australia, an organisation that delivers health and relationships education to students and their parents, and she has lived in Japan and Turkey. Her debut novel was The Secret Son, released in 2015 and is about truth, history and what it means to be a good man. Her second novel, Little Gods, was published in 2018. Little Gods is a story about girlhood and the mess of family, and was shortlisted for the Stella Prize in 2019. Hurdy Gurdy is her third novel.