Thunderhead

Miranda Darling

‘A feminist triumph and homage to Virginia Woolf, Miranda Darling’s Thunderhead is a potent exploration of suburban entrapment for women.’

Cassandra Atherton, Australian Book Review

‘Short, sharp and immersive … Thunderhead is a powerful story that explores motherhood, mental health, our sense of self and our right to autonomy in the context of relentless, everyday domestic life. This is complex, layered and beautiful writing that invites readers to consider their own wild and chaotic inner worlds, and the ways in which negative relationships shape us.’

Danielle Bagnato, The Big Issue

View all reviews

‘Miranda Darling writes from the absolute edge and leads us atop a tightrope strung high between submission and freedom. This book is the loss of balance, the breathlessness before the fall. Sharp, complex, and painfully relatable, Thunderhead is a firecracker of a story that lives up to its title. Darling’s dry wit and stark prose swallowed me whole, and I know I’ll be ruminating over it for a while to come.’

Lucy Fleming, Readings

‘Darkly funny, astute, timely — Thunderhead’s protagonist insists on being heard, and we as readers feel compelled to listen. To care. Such a fresh and lovely voice, full of humour, insight, and energy. I loved Winona — and her story.’

Sofie Laguna, author of The Eye of the Sheep

‘Thunderhead takes the brewing storm of domesticity and cracks it open with incredible vulnerability, generosity, and humour. At once Rachel Cusk, at once Jenny Offill, and altogether entirely Miranda Darling, this powerful, restless, irresistible novel is essential reading.’

Laura Jean McKay, author of The Animals in That Country

‘In prose that’s intense, darkly funny and searingly astute, Darling successfully conveys the sense of entrapment, the frantic bargaining with fate and the ultimate powerlessness of a woman overwhelmed by a vicious man.’

Anne Green, Good Reading Magazine

‘Set over one fever-pitched day … It's a daring book, adopting the aesthetics of Deborah Levy with the velocity of a crime thriller and an off-kilter voice, deeply internal, darkly comic, clipped, and Woolfish … Thunderhead brims with magazine-style musings — all those dizzying top notes, that intertextuality, the style. It's a strong, complex and self-aware voice, and it is the primary vehicle through which we gauge Winona's resilience and determination. If The Catcher in the Rye were instead penned by a domestic violence survivor, it might read a little like Thunderhead. For fans of Melissa Broder, Elizabeth Hardwick and Edwina Preston.’

Mel Fulton, Books+Publishing

A black comedy, set in suburbia, about one woman’s struggle to be free.

When Winona Dalloway begins her day — in the peaceful early hours before her children, that ‘tiny tornado of little hands and feet’, wake up — she doesn’t know that by the end of it, everything in her world will have changed.

On the outside, Winona is a seemingly unremarkable young mother: unobtrusive, quietly going about her tasks. But within is a vivid, chaotic self, teeming with voices — a mind both wild and precise.

And meanwhile, a storm is brewing …

‘A feminist triumph and homage to Virginia Woolf, Miranda Darling’s Thunderhead is a potent exploration of suburban entrapment for women.’

Cassandra Atherton, Australian Book Review

Danielle Bagnato, The Big Issue

View all reviews

Lucy Fleming, Readings

Sofie Laguna, author of The Eye of the Sheep

Laura Jean McKay, author of The Animals in That Country

Anne Green, Good Reading Magazine

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Details

Format:Hardback

Size: 210mm × 135mm

Extent:160pp

ISBN (13):9781761380396

RRP:$29.99

Pub date:3 Apr 2024

Rights Held: World English

High-res cover:Download Image

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Miranda Darling

Miranda Darling is a writer, poet, and co-founder of Vanishing Pictures. She read English and Modern Languages at Oxford then took a Masters in Strategic Studies and Defence from the ANU (GSSD). She became an adjunct scholar at a public policy think tank, specialising in non-traditional security threats. She has published both fiction and nonfiction; Thunderhead is her fifth book.

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