Keely Jobe in conversation with Melissa Manning

Keely Jobe in conversation with Melissa Manning.
Join us for a discussion and book signing to celebrate the release of Keely Jobe's The Endling.

A feminist utopia crumbles with one impossible birth.

On an isolated mountaintop, a small feminist community is fracturing under the weight of ideological divides and dwindling numbers. Mila struggles to hold the women together, while deeper in the bush her aunt Frank — an ailing recluse — lives with only her dog, Chicken Midnight, for company. Nearby, an orchid endling approaches its own death, and the extinction of its entire species.

As Frank grows increasingly unwell and secretive about her condition, the community women begin mysteriously falling pregnant. When Mila gives birth to the only boy, their hardline separatist ideals face an impossible test.

Vividly expressed, wildly funny, and wholly original, The Endling examines the volatile intersection of community and politics, exploring what happens when the borders we construct between species, between sexes, between self and world prove more porous than we imagine.

Keely Jobe is a writer of fiction and nonfiction living on the east coast of Lutruwita/Tasmania with her partner and two staffies. Her work has appeared in The Monthly, Island Magazine, Australian Geographic, and Cosmos. She has a PhD in English and Creative Writing from the University of Tasmania and is the nonfiction editor at Island Magazine. The Endling is her first novel.

Melissa Manning is an Australian writer. Her debut interlinked story collection, Smokehouse, won the Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for Fiction (2022), and was shortlisted for the USQ Steele Rudd Award for a Short Story Collection. Her short fiction and narrative non-fiction has been awarded and published in literary journals and anthologies, including Overland, Meanjin, Southerly, The Big Issue, Award Winning Australian Writing, To Carry Her Home (UK) and Best Small Fictions (USA).