There's No Telling: A powerful and captivating 2023 debut novel about family, heartbreak and grief from an award-winning author

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From critically acclaimed author, Mark Mordue, comes a poetic, compressed and powerfully beautiful novel, which will work its way under your skin.

A sunny, bright, cold Christmas morning. Two young girls go ice-skating on a frozen pond and tragically drown. Lives are lost, and lives are irrevocably changed.

Three years later, on Christmas Eve, Darcy Travers, the father of one of the girls, is struggling with the anniversary, as he does each year, battling with his inability to accept the loss of his daughter. Sometimes, he feels, she's still there, ghost-like, just on the edge of his vision, watching over him. Zel, his ex-wife, is similarly bereft. Like Darcy she is consumed by grief and rage, as the pair blame each other. They are bonded in their suffering with their neighbours, Pete and Suda Kelly, the parents of the other girl who drowned.

As snowy winter weather sets in around the town of Thule, and night closes in on Christmas Eve, a series of unexpected events propels the lives of these people together once more.

From critically acclaimed writer Mark Mordue comes a darkly beautiful novel about grief and love, and how they are inextricably intertwined. How does a parent endure the loss of a much-loved child What happens to someone suffering that kind of grief And how might Christmas feel in the years to come if you had a lost child to put to rest in your soul Both a love story and ghost story, There's No Telling is about grief, loss, shame and redemption - and how we can work our way back from the very worst thing that can happen to us.

Author Bio

Mark Mordue is an Australian writer, journalist and editor. He is a co-winner of the 2014 Peter Blazey Fellowship, which recognises the development of an outstanding manuscript in the fields of biography, autobiography or life writing. He is the author of the acclaimed poetry collection Darlinghurst Funeral Rites (Transit Lounge, 2017), and the memoir Dastgah: Diary of a Headtrip (Allen & Unwin, 2001), which was shortlisted for the 2002 Qantas/City of Brisbane Asia-Pacific Travel Writing Prize. His journalism has been published in Rolling Stone, Vogue, GQ, Interview, The Australian and the Sydney Morning Herald. He was the winner of a 1992 Human Rights Media Award and the 2010 Pascall Prize for Australian 'Critic of the Year'. From 1992 to 1997 he was the founding editor of Australia's leading pop-culture magazine, Australian Style, and from 2016 to 2018 he was the editor of the innovative inner-city Sydney cultural newspaper Neighbourhood. His poetry was shortlisted for the 2016 WB Yeats Poetry Prize and, together with his fiction, essays and memoir work, has appeared in literary journals such as HEAT, Meanjin, Griffith Review and Overland.