Join Jacqueline Maley, in conversation with Catherine Milne, to celebrate the release of her new novel Lonely Mouth, in-store at Gertrude & Alice Cafe Bookstore.

WHEN: Wednesday, 7th of May 2025, at Gertrude & Alice Cafe Bookstore. Please arrive at 6:45pm for a prompt 7pm start.

TICKETS:

1 x Admission + 1 x Book Ticket: $55.00 (excluding external fees), includes admission for one, a copy of Lonely Mouth by Jacqueline Maley (RRP: $34.95), a glass of wine and nibbles upon arrival.

2 x Admission + 1 x Book Tickets: $70.00 (excluding external fees), includes admission for two, a copy of Lonely Mouth by Jacqueline Maley (RRP: $34.95), a glass of wine and nibbles upon arrival.

'Lonely mouth ... It's a Japanese expression. 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. You want to put something in your mouth but you're not exactly hungry. Or maybe, like, a constant hunger that will never be sated.'

About Lonely Mouth:

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, careless. 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 Del Ray, comes back into the sisters' lives, determined to apologise 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.

Lonely Mouth is a delicious, clever, tender and vivid novel about the conflicted way women think about their bodies, their appetites, and themselves in the world.

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: Catherine Milne

Catherine has worked in publishing for many years, including with Penguin Books, Allen & Unwin, and since 2012 with HarperCollins, where she is now Head of Fiction. Her list is eclectic, but consistently award-winning and bestselling. From literary fiction to crossover/bookclub fiction and narrative non-fiction, she looks for books that seize her and make her feel. In recent years, that’s been books like Julia Baird’s Phosphorescence, Trent Dalton’s Boy Swallows Universe, Holly Ringland’s The Lost Flowers of Alice Hart, Stan Grant’s Talking to My Country, and Meg Mason’s Sorrow and Bliss.

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 homemade 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.

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