A feminist utopia crumbles with one impossible birth.
On an isolated mountaintop, a small feminist community is fracturing under the weight of ideological divides and dwindling numbers. Mila struggles to hold the women together, while deeper in the bush her aunt Frank--an ailing recluse--lives with only her dog, Chicken Midnight, for company. Nearby, an orchid endling approaches its own death, and the extinction of its entire species.
As Frank grows increasingly unwell and secretive about her condition, the community women begin mysteriously falling pregnant. When Mila gives birth to the only boy, their hardline separatist ideals face an impossible test.
Vividly expressed, wildly funny, and wholly original, The Endling examines the volatile intersection of community and politics, exploring what happens when the borders we construct between species, between sexes, between self and world prove more porous than we imagine.
About the Author :
Keely Jobe is a writer of fiction and nonfiction living on the east coast of Lutruwita/Tasmania with her partner and two staffies. Her work has appeared in The Monthly, Island Magazine, Australian Geographic, and Cosmos. She has a PhD in English and Creative Writing from the University of Tasmania and is the nonfiction editor at Island Magazine. The Endling is her first novel. Keely lives in Tasmania.
Review :
"Keely Jobe's intoxicating surrealistic novel ... [is] electric and unnerving ... The Endling follows a radical feminist community's undoing."
--Michelle Anne-Schlinger, Foreword Reviews
"Jobe's descriptions of the flora and fauna--and of the human body ... have a physicality that engages the senses ... The novel's hallucinogenic fever-dream of a climax sees the concerns around climate change, which simmer for most of the novel, boil to the surface. Those final pages are vivid and disturbing, and written with remarkable control of rhythm and tone. By the breathless end, we're left with the impression that, in a last-ditch attempt to survive, the natural world will go to extreme lengths to protect itself from our more radical inclinations."
--Ian Mond, Locus Magazine
"Jobe is at her best when demonstrating the alternating horrors and blessings of activist community ... Jobe's writing enthralls, bringing to life the hot, horny organism that is the Australian wilderness ... [An] immersive and sweltering novel."
--Noelle McManus, Necessary Fiction
"Drawing on her own experience living in a remote all-female commune, an Australian novelist imagines a crisis in such a compound when all of the women mysteriously become pregnant and one of the children turns out to be a boy."
--Matt Witt, World Wide Work
"Keely Jobe's The Endling is an exquisite debut. A novel that goes right to the heart of urgent environmental, gender, and multispecies conversations and practices, and then probes further -- it blooms! I am blown away by the majesty of Jobe's world -- managing voices across species, with an intimacy that speaks to everyone. This is the novel we need to be reading right now."
--Laura Jean McKay, author of The Animals in That Country
"The Endling is a transformative novel, a real one of a kind. Equal parts tender and feral. An impure delight."
--Jennifer Mills, author of Salvage
"To read The Endling is to engage in a physical act. Of course, this is always true of reading. But the way in which Keely Jobe weaves the rhythms of the bush with the bodily and intellectual processes of her human and nonhuman characters creates a prose that, much like the tangle orchid that snares the character Frank, reaches beyond the page and gathers the reader into its steamy, slippery, and prickly world. This novel is alive in a way that is striking and original."
--Erin Hortle, author of The Octopus and I
