I sat in the silence for a good 8 minutes after finishing this book, just sitting with all the feelings it drudged up.

Sometimes a first kiss can be life changing when it shows you who you really are. For two friends, both of whom happen to be girls, their first kiss changed everything. That kiss was the catalyst that sent them hurtling down two very different life paths, paths that unknowingly ran pretty close to parallel for nearly three decades while each person lived wildly different realities. Set in the 1970s through the early 1990s, in Australia, before, during, and after the AIDS pandemic in the 1980s. We get to see, through two different lenses, how life and society changed during those years for queer individuals. Each chapter is told in single POV, in third person, but from both people’s perspective, even though they are not interacting at all. It’s written in a stream of consciousness style. Part prose, part inner dialogue, it swept me up and carried me downstream before spitting me out in Bondi Bay.

I applied for this arc on NetGalley because I’d been feeling uninspired by the books I’ve been reading lately, everything feeling very similar and formulaic, and I desperately wanted to read something that felt different and fresh and emotionally moving, and by golly did this check all those boxes. I’m so glad I received this arc, I’m so glad I read this book, I’m so glad I “met” these characters. They will live on in me.

This book is fantastic. I stayed up late reading it and absolutely sobbed the last 1/3 of the book. Both the story and writing are beautiful. I should have more fleshed out things to say about this book, but I'm a little emotionally raw from reading it lol. I was soo into the intersection of art history, queer history, and character interiority in this book. I just loved it. Thank you NetGalley for the arc <3

A Language of Limbs by Dylin Hardcastle is a hauntingly beautiful exploration of parallel lives and missed connections. Through poetic prose and profound emotion, Hardcastle weaves a story of two women whose paths almost intersect across decades of struggle and joy, culminating in a deeply moving narrative about love and identity.

Ouch ouch ouch. This book balanced tragedy with poetry and love. The story of two young people in Australia, navigating their queerness during the AIDS pandemic, having parallel life experiences while narrowly missing one another for many years — I’ve never read anything like it.