Too Much Lip

November 23, 2020
A daughter gets caught in her Aboriginal Australian family’s complicated legacy in Indigenous Australian writer Lucashenko’s darkly funny U.S. debut. With 33-year-old Kerry Salter’s girlfriend in jail after a bipolar episode culminating in armed robbery, Kerry rides her motorcycle from Sydney to her small hometown of Durrongo, New South Wales, to visit her terminally ill grandfather. During a trip to a favorite swimming spot on her family’s ancestral land, Kerry learns crooked local official Jim Buckley plans to sell the land, which is owned by the state, to build a prison. Her older brother, washed-up soccer star Ken, launches a crusade to fight the land sale to soothe his rage over his younger brother, whom they call Black Superman, for getting ahead with a fancy government job in Sydney. An unexpected sexual relationship with a white man Kerry went to school with leads her to discover that her sister, Donna, who was presumed dead after going missing nearly 20 years ago, is in fact alive, passing for white, and working with Buckley. Kerry cajoles Donna into attending their mother’s birthday party, where Donna explodes with a secret that fractures the family just as their feud with Buckley reaches a fever pitch. With strong voices and kinetic prose, Lucashenko’s engrossing narrative speaks to the ongoing traumas of indigenous life in Australia. This deserves to make a splash.

May 31, 2018
The title of Melissa Lucashenko’s latest book—both an accusation and a lament—speaks of hunger, greed, desperation, destruction and redemption. Central to the novel are themes of rage, incarceration, and generational trauma. After an armed robbery gone awry, Kerry returns to her hometown to say farewell to her dying Pop. But the stakes change, and Kerry finds herself fighting to save her family’s land, burial grounds, history and connection to home. Lucashenko is writing what can be described as the postmodern Indigenous Australian novel, and Too Much Lip will appeal broadly to readers of Australian fiction, smart and politically minded rural and romance titles, and Indigenous fiction. It is both literary and pulp fiction, high culture and low. More than anything, as a white lady from North Queensland, this story is both for me and not. Lucashenko evokes a sense of deep recognition of this country’s language, landscape and place with her prose. Her writing is as varied as her characters for whom identity is never singular or simple. By turns elegantly descriptive and exquisitely affronting, Too Much Lip describes a family in perpetual crisis: fractured, addicted, abused and abusive, absent and broken. It is a challenge and a delight to read.

Amy Vuleta is a Melbourne bookseller