Pink Mountain on Locust Island - by Jamie Marina Lau (Paperback)

About the Book

Blending digital fever dream and hard-boiled noir in bursts of claustrophobic prose, in Pink Mountain on Locust Island, a teenager follows her maybe-boyfriend into the seedy corners of the art world.

Book Synopsis

Blending digital fever dream and hard-boiled noir in bursts of claustrophobic prose, in Pink Mountain on Locust Island, a teenager follows her maybe-boyfriend into the seedy corners of the art world.

Review Quotes

Praise for Pink Mountain on Locust Island

Finalist for the 2019 Stella Prize
Finalist for the 2019 New South Wales Premier Literary Awards
Finalist for the 2018 Readings Prize for New Australian Fiction
Finalist for the Australia Literature Society Gold Medal

"[A] deliciously disjointed novel . . . [with] fizzingly short chapters and an ultra-contemporary plot that seems tailor-made to appeal to distracted digital natives." -ELLE Australia

"Lau's dizzying prose is like a series of crazy neon-lit performance art as she dissects, with extraordinary effervescence, Monk's teenage angst, her struggles to fit in with her school friends, their parents, her father and her unhappily married sister." --Stella Prize Citation

"This inventive work satisfies in its blending of teenage ennui and a fragmented noir aesthetic." --Publishers Weekly

"[H]yperassociative, impressively strange." --Kirkus

"Strange and raucous. . . . Lau captures all this with a chaotic, instantly addictive style and canny insights into the motivations that drive people to do some very dark things." --Kristin Iversen, Refinery29

"[A] rapturous inversion of boy-meets-girl; a narrative that unfurls with prescience in surrealist vignettes, laced with cosmic specificities." --Gauraa Shekhar, Maudlin House

"This novel is a strange peninsula of tender and splintered and waterlogged prose. I want to bottle it and put it on my mantle and dare every guest to take a sip." --Hilary Leichter

"Bouncing with the violence of everyday banality, Pink Mountain on Locust Island understands how the malaise of youth can turn the humdrum into the magical. Jaime Marina Lau has the poetic third eye and she walks between worlds. Weird AF, but in that good way." --Nikki Darling

"Episodic, startling, young, this is a must read. The language is indeed elastic, and lovely." --Chaya Bhuvaneswar

"Queasily cinematic, as if Wong Kar-Wai and Agnes Varda took an acid trip together, shot through with flashes of sly, pitch perfect humor." --Mimi Lok

About the Author

Jamie Marina Lau is a twenty-three-year-old multidisciplinary writer and artist. Her debut novel Pink Mountain on Locust Island won the 2018 Melbourne Prize Readings Residency Award; was shortlisted for the 2019 Stella Prize, the 2019 New South Wales Premier's Literary Awards, the 2018 Readings Prize for New Australian Fiction, and the Australia Literature Society Gold Medal. Her writing can also be found in various publications. She is currently in the process of writing her second novel, Gunk Baby, working on various projects, and producing music.