‘Her writing about people is filthy, fresh, and funny; this is prose on high alert, hackles up and teeth bared in every sentence. The novel becomes both a stirring attempt to inhabit other consciousnesses and a wry demonstration of the limits of our own language and empathy. ’
‘an absorbing and affecting book, and one to which I’m able to pay the highest compliment: that, in the days after finishing it, the world felt different to me, its animals not speaking but not silent either.’
Awards
Winner Of The 2021 Arthur C. Clarke Award
Winner of the 2021 Victorian Prize For Literature
Winner of the 2021 Victorian Premier's Literary Awards Prize For Fiction
Co-winner of the 2020 Aurealis Awards' Best Science Fiction Novel
Winner of the 2021 ABIA Small Publishers’ Adult Book Of The Year
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Shortlisted for The Queensland Literary Award
A Guardian Best Fiction of 2023
McKay’s deployment of language is as exciting and original as her manipulation of ideas. The stories in Gunflower are provocative, poetic, vibrantly alive to contemporary concerns.
An entrancing work filled with stories that stick in your memory like a knife and tales that return to haunt you in the quiet hours of the night. McKay takes the reader from birth to death, examining the relationships that bind and define us, while immersing each story in a pensive, surreal sheen that makes the mundane seem just as strange as the fantastical.
