Bondi Literary Salon Book Club: Lonely Mouth

Join the Bondi Literary Salon for our book club, hosted by Dave Francis! In our gathering, we will discuss Jacqueline Maley's new book, Lonely Mouth.

WHEN: Tuesday, 22nd July 2025, at Gertrude & Alice Cafe Bookstore; please arrive at 6.45pm for a prompt 7pm start.

TICKETS: 

Admission: $25.00 (excluding external fees). Your ticket includes a drink on arrival and nibbles during the evening.

A captivating and delicious novel from the bestselling author of The Truth About Her, for fans of Blue Sisters and Sorrow and Bliss

About the book: Lonely Mouth

'Lonely mouth ... It's a Japanese expression. It means, like, you feel like you want to eat something, but you don't know what it is. You're looking for just the right thing. But maybe there is no right thing. Maybe you don't need anything at all.'

Matilda and Lara are half-sisters who share an unreliable mother and a chaotic past. In every other way, though, they are very different from each other. Lara, ten years younger than Matilda, is a model, living and working in Paris - for her, life is expansive, carefree, beautiful. Matilda's life, in contrast, is solitary, contained, ordered. She works in one of Sydney's buzziest restaurants, Bocca, with an unrequited crush on her boss, celebrity chef Colson. If she's careful - and she always is - she can keep everything in its proper place. Hold the balance between hunger and satiation.

But when Lara's father, the long-absent, erratic Angus Dante, comes back into the sisters' lives to amke amends for his past misdeeds, Matilda's compartmentalised life goes seriously awry. As everything blows apart, Matilda is forced to come to a reckoning with who she is, and how to satisfy the hunger she wants to deny.

From bestselling author Jacqueline Maley, Lonely Mouth is a tender, vivid and fiercely relatable novel about the conflicted way women think about their bodies, their appetites, and themselves in the world, about the loneliness of girls and women, and the way we believe ourselves to be worthy - or not - of love.

About the author:

Jacqueline Maley is a Walkley and Kennedy Award-winning columnist and senior writer for the Sydney Morning Herald and Age newspapers, where she writes about politics, people and social affairs. Her bestselling debut novel, The Truth About Her, was shortlisted for the 2022 ABIA Literary Fiction Book of the Year and the Matt Richell Award for New Writer of the Year. She lives in Sydney with her daughter.

About the host:

Dave Francis has been a long time Bondi Literary Salon fan, and avid reader from an early age thanks to both parents filling him with a love of words and stories. He has a degree in English Lit from Otago University which helped with his love of the classics and poetry, and has recently (re) dived into a Shakespeare rabbit hole. 

Some of Dave's favourite books include: 100 Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera and Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace.

'Tender, acute, searing and funny, I devoured this novel. It's a coming-of-age novel and a Bildungsroman all at once - about the enormous effort of finding yourself when you start with bad odds - being abandoned as a child by your mother under the Big Merino at Goulburn. Maley's characters are so gloriously alive I felt I knew them. A beautifully structured novel about how desire - for food, for love, for meaning - can shape a life, if you can just be whole enough to tap into it.' Anna Funder

About The Bondi Literary Salon

Bondi Literary Salon was established in 2018, it is the in-house book club of beloved Bondi institution, Gertrude & Alice. The Bondi Literary Salon endeavours to explore the vast world of literature each month, with a selection that reflects a focus on diverse writers and stories; delving into both classic and contemporary fiction, as well as non-fiction. 

Our philosophy has always been to use language and literature not only as a tool for connection and community, but as an insight into worlds we have not had the pleasure of visiting ourselves. We welcome all - young and old, those with a life-long love of literature, or whose relationship may be only beginning. Join us in the unmatched comfort of an after-hours bookstore, accompanied by wine and cheese, for an evening spent discussing books and building community.

About Gertrude & Alice Cafe Bookstore

Rated as one of the top 10 bookstores in the world by National Geographic, Gertrude & Alice Cafe Bookstore is an oasis for writers, readers, and coffee lovers. Books overflow from the shelves of their store, featuring a mix of new, second-hand, antiquarian and rare books. Stay a while & enjoy some home made chai, and amazing coffee, and unearth a book treasure or two. Read more about the bookstore's story here, and about the real Gertrude & Alice here.