Monk and her father have their daily routine down-pat. She spends her time going to school and exploring Chinatown, while he lays on the couch, despairing over how hopeless his life has become. It’s safe, predictable and even a little boring, but it’s how things work, and Monk takes comfort in that. Until Santa Coy enters their lives.
Santa Coy has this exotic aura surrounding him and suddenly everything is new and exciting. All at once they are swept up in his intoxicating personality and drawn into a tantalising world of the new age, violence and drugs. It’s enthralling, but its also very different from everything Monk has known. As much as she has come to love Santa Coy, she begins to wonder if this new exciting life she had always dreamed of is everything worth what she is on the brink of losing.
Pink Mountain on Locust Island is out now. Click here for your copy!
Pink Mountain on Locust Island is the debut novel from Jamie Marina Lau, a 20-year-old musician and writer from Melbourne. Both critics and readers alike have praised Lau’s fresh new voice and hint that there are great things in this new writer’s future, with Books + Publishing contributor Kelsey Oldham calling her “an electric new writer”.
And it’s hard to disagree with them. Lau has a unique style of writing that verges on poetic. While it may sound cliché, Lau has a handle on the written word, and knows how to use it with brevity in a way that even the most accomplished authors still struggle to grasp.
Each page presents something new, with the novel set up in short, sharp chapters with insightful reflections. It’s compelling and truly something I have never come across before outside the poetic genre. The melding of this style into a more long-form piece is intriguing and something that I hope Lau continues with in future releases.
The characters and plot-line of Pink Mountain on Locust Island are just as engaging as the style within which their tale is written. Monk is the protagonist that readers of the “hard-boiled noir” genre come to love, her naivety and quirks make this more modern and vibrant than those we have expect from classic authors like Raymond Chandler or even contemporaries like Sara Paretsky and Sue Grafton.
Pink Mountain on Locust Island is real and magnetic, simple yet so full of life. If this is just the beginning, Australian literature has gained something special.
Pink Mountain on Locust Island is published by Brow Books, an imprint of the publishers behind The Lifted Brow. To find out more about this novel, or those they will soon be publishing, visit their website.
Jackie Smith Writes 