This dystopian novel has a unique premise – Berlin as a queer utopia, but this version of the city has an alternative history.
The story features fascinating characters such as Cissie, a straight married woman discovering the trans district, and William and Gareth, a young gay couple establishing their relationship.
At first, these individuals feel like archetypes, even though we fully connect with them emotionally. This is the beauty of the author’s structure. We understand what they represent in the context of this metropolis, until their voices are heard more and more.
And when the use of dialogue is expanded, what we understand of this Berlin, and the characters, changes.
In this stunning work of speculative urban fiction, Redfern Jon Barrett breaks down the binary between utopia and dystopia—presenting an ambitopian vision of the world’s first gay state.
A glittering gay metropolis of 24 million people, Berlin is a bustling world of pride parades, polyamorous trysts, and even an official gay language. Its distant radio broadcasts are a lifeline for teenagers William and Gareth, who flee toward sanctuary. But is there a place for them in the deeply divided city?
Meanwhile, young mother Cissie loves Berlin’s towering high rises and chaotic multiculturalism, yet she’s never left her heterosexual district—not until…
Omar Sakr is a poet. Son of Sin is his first novel and his prose reflects his poetic style.
You can see this in extracts such as:
“…the staggered and warped back and forth of people who don’t know how to talk to each other without trying to win, to force the other to concede.”
And this is what appealed to me about this work. It’s less of a narrative and more of a meditation on identity. Yes, there are story elements, but the words make you muse on what it means to ‘fit in’.
One message I took away is the idea that our identity is linked to memory, and memory fades. And it’s reflections like this that makes this novel stay with you long after the final page.
Poet Omar Sakr’s debut novel is a fierce and fantastic force that illuminates the bonds that bind families together as well as what can break them.
An estranged father. An abused and abusive mother. An army of relatives. A tapestry of violence, woven across generations and geographies, from Turkey to Lebanon to Western Sydney. This is the legacy left to Jamal Smith, a young queer Muslim trying to escape a past in which memory and rumour trace ugly shapes in the dark. When every thread in life constricts instead of connects, how do you find a way to breathe? Torn…
It’s because a Baby Boomer wrote it, sharing her experience after her husband confessed to having an affair with one of her best friends.
No, neither me nor my husband have had an affair. But I’m a Gen Xer who’s reaching a major milestone on my next birthday, and the author’s reflections on infidelity and life in general, put my own life in perspective.
On a flight home I read the words, “It is not our partner we are turning away from, but the person we have become.” I put down the book and contemplated.
I had things to let go of, and because I like who I am, it wasn’t hard.
What do you do when your partner's infidelity upends your life? When you confront living on your own? In amongst parents dying, careers ending and becoming a grandparent?
As a journalist, Kate Legge often seeks answers to how people reckon with bad luck or bad decisions. When faced with her husband's affair, she discovered a fault line of betrayal running through four generations of his family, which began a search for answers both close to home and more universaly.
Infidelity and Other Affairs begins with this puzzle: is unfaithfulness a predisposition or a learned behavior? From there, Legge contemplates a…
Stanley is almost fifty. He hates his job, has an overbearing mother, and is in a failed relationship. Then he meets Asher, the man of his dreams, literally in his dreams. Asher is young, captivating, and confident about his future—everything Stanley is not.
So, Asher gives Stan a gift. The chance to be an extra five years younger each time they meet. Some of their adventures are whimsical. A few are challenging. Others are totally surreal. But when they fall in love, Stan knows he can’t live in Asher’s dreamworld. Yet he is haunted by Asher’s invitation to “slip into eternal sleep.”
