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Bite Your Tongue

Rendle-Short Francesca author

Format:Paperback

Publisher:Spinifex Press

Published:6th Sep '11

Currently unavailable, and unfortunately no date known when it will be back

Bite Your Tongue cover

In Francesca Rendle-Short’s family, silence was golden. So to break ranks and tell stories about her peculiar family life and her mother’s moral crusading should send this daughter straight to hell in a ball of smoke and flame along with all those books her mother wanted to burn. Some stories are hard to tell. But like reading, writing stories changes everything. Set in 1970s Queensland and also contemporary times, Bite Your Tongue is an elegant mix of novel and memoir that is in turn harrowing and delightful. It threads together the childhood story of the fictional Glory Solider, with the thoughts and experiences of the adult author, Francesca Rendle-Short, as she looks more deeply into her mother’s activism at the time of facing her mother’s death. Can a daughter forgive her mother for making her a pawn in her conservative moral crusades? Can greater understanding reinstate love? What does a mother owe a daughter and a daughter a mother?

"Rendle-Short has created an engaging, unsettling and at times darkly funny account of her childhoodthat will be of interest to those studying literary representations of mother-daughter relationships." - Bronwen Lacken,Kings College London June 2015

ISBN: 9781876756963

Dimensions: 230mm x 155mm x 20mm

Weight: 330g

246 pages