About the Book
The stunning new novel from the author of Ironbark.
It's the 1950s in conservative Australia, and Christopher, a young gay man, moves to "the City" to escape the repressive atmosphere of his tiny hometown. Once there, however, he finds that it is just as censorial and punitive, in its own way.
Then Christopher meets Morgan, and the two fall in love--a love that breathes truth back into Christopher's stifled life. But the society around them remains rigid and unchanging, and what begins as a refuge for both men inevitably buckles under the intensity of navigating a world that wants them to refuse what they are. Will their devotion be enough to keep them together?
In reviving a time that is still so recent yet so vastly different from now, Jay Carmichael has drawn on archival material, snippets of newspaper articles, and photos to create the claustrophobic environment in which these two men lived and loved. Told with Carmichael's ear for sparse, poetic beauty, Marlo takes us into the landscape of a relationship defined as much by what is said and shared as by what has to remain unsaid.
About the Author :
Jay Carmichael is a writer and editor whose first novel, Ironbark, was shortlisted for the Victorian Premier's Literary Award for Fiction in 2019, and whose writing has been published by Beyond Blue and appeared widely in print and online, including in Overland, The Guardian, SBS, and The Telling Tree project. Jay lives and works in Melbourne.
Review :
"Falling in love can be terrifying and all the harder when the laws of the land are against you. Marlo is a deeply affecting novel; tender and brutal by turn."
--Sophie Cunningham
"What's most striking about Marlo is its quiet dignity, the lightness of touch with which Carmichael tells this story, which is about recognition and discovery as much as it is about love. Christopher's unfolding realization--that in order to come of age he must also cast himself out--is never cause for him to abandon his optimism and his willingness to hope for and work for a life and a love, however unsanctioned, of his own making. Carmichael's reclaiming of a sidelined history is defiantly hopeful too, resisting tragedy and seeking out forgotten joys instead."
--Fiona Wright
"Affecting ... While the novel portrays an era of criminalized desire, it doesn't cede its emotional terrain to misery and shame, giving honest-to-goodness lust and love its due, too, without soft-soaping historical ills."
--Anthony Cummins, Daily Mail
"Through rich language, Carmichael portrays sparkling drag clubs and dark back alleys in a way that feels at once enchanting and perilous ... The relationship between Christopher and Morgan illuminates conversations about gender and race: as an Aboriginal and a gay man, Morgan lives an even more dangerous life, and this intersectionality is engaging ... Marlo is a character-driven novel about the harsh realities of being queer in Australia and what it meant to fight for love during a time when the world fought back."
--Allison Janicki, Foreword Reviews
"Queer lives were dangerous, so hidden and coded. They are hard to retrieve. Jay Carmichael himself notes that his project is 'a task of inference' ... [Marlo's] style is spare, with use of actual photographs to create a mood both bleak and secretly joyous. It depicts past Melbourne as alien as a distant planet."
--Lucy Sussex, The Sydney Morning Herald
"Carmichael's second novel is a noble exercise in mapping lived but seemingly lost Australian queer histories. With its unfettered prose, Marlo is a quiet and earnest story of gay male desire and longing."
--Nathan Smith, Books+Publishing
"This novel, written with controlled retrospective fury and pain, is interleaved with archival black and white photographs of Melbourne, of known beats at the time and of particular parties. The photographs--grim, poignant, essentially dull--resonate. As does the novel. This was us? Indeed, it was."
-Helen Elliott, The Monthly
"Marlo affords a great opportunity to learn about past gay lives."
--Ivan Crozier, The Newtown Review of Books
Praise for Ironbark:
"Jay Carmichael's Ironbark does the extraordinary. It achieves what we readers want from the best of fiction: to tell a story anew, and to capture a world in all its wonder, ugliness, tenderness, and cruelty. This is a novel of coming of age and of grief that astonishes us by its wisdom and by its compassion. It's a work of great and simple beauty, so good it made me jealous. And grateful."
--Christos Tsiolkas
"Jay Carmichael approaches the world as a poet, from an angle that is all his own. He reveals a hidden, pulsing reality beneath the surface of the everyday."
--Miles Allinson, author of Fever of Animals and In Moonland
"In sparse and quiet prose, Jay Carmichael's debut is an enveloping novel about grief, survival, and the futility of finding peace in a place you don't belong."
--Shaun Prescott, author of The Town
"My only complaint is that Marlo left me wanting more."
--Sarah L'Estrange, ABC News
"Carmichael traces a hopeful story of two men trying to carve out some small corner of domestic peace that allows for joy. Even in its brevity, Marlo offers a glorious peek into historical gaps that were far from uninhabited."
--Stephen A. Russell, The Saturday Paper
"[A] powerful, moving novella ... Marlo reminds readers that the battle for equality is a continuum with a history."
--ANZ LitLovers
"Through rich language, Carmichael portrays sparkling drag clubs and dark back alleys in a way that feels at once enchanting and perilous ... The relationship between Christopher and Morgan illuminates conversations about gender and race: as an Aboriginal and a gay man, Morgan lives an even more dangerous life, and this intersectionality is engaging ... Marlo is a character-driven novel about the harsh realities of being queer in Australia and what it meant to fight for love during a time when the world fought back."
--Allison Janicki, Foreword Reviews
"Carmichael's poetic second novel Marlo [is] a perfectly crafted story of love between two men set in conservative post-war Melbourne ... [it] "makes history immediate, every page pulsing with heart and sensuality"."
--Judges' comments from the Sydney Morning Herald Best Young Australian Novelists Award
