Lonely Mouth

From the bestselling author of The Truth About Her comes Lonely Mouth, a delicious, clever, tender and vivid novel about the conflicted way women think about their bodies, their appetites, and themselves in the world.

-Lonely mouth ... It-s a Japanese expression. You feel like you want to eat something but you don-t know what it is. You-re looking for just the right thing. But maybe there is no right thing. Maybe you don-t need anything at all. You want to put something in your mouth but you-re not exactly hungry. Or maybe, like, a constant hunger that will never be sated.-

Matilda and Lara are half-sisters who share an unreliable mother and a chaotic past. In every other way, though, they are very different from each other. Lara, ten years younger than Matilda, is a model, living and working in Paris - for her, life is expansive, carefree, beautiful, careless. Matilda-s life, in contrast, is solitary, contained, ordered. She works in one of Sydney-s buzziest restaurants, Bocca, with an unrequited crush on her boss, celebrity chef Colson. If she-s careful - and she always is - she can keep everything in its proper place. Hold the balance between hunger and satiation.

But when Lara-s father, the long-absent, erratic Angus Del Ray, comes back into the sisters- lives, determined to apologise for his past misdeeds, Matilda-s compartmentalised life goes seriously awry. As everything blows apart, Matilda is forced to come to a reckoning with who she is, and how to satisfy the hunger she wants to deny.