Feast
ABOUT
THE BOOK
Alison is an actress who no longer acts, Patrick a musician past his prime. The eccentric couple live an isolated existence in Scotland. That is, until Patrick’s teenage daughter, Neve, flees Australia to spend a year abroad with her father, and the stepmother she barely knows.
On the weekend of Neve’s eighteenth birthday, her father insists on a special feast to mark her coming of age. Despite Neve’s objections, her mother Shannon arrives in Scotland to join the celebrations. What none of them know is that Shannon has arrived with a hidden agenda that has the potential to shatter the delicate façade of the loving, if dysfunctional, family.
NOMINATING LIBRARY COMMENTS
At the 2019 Queensland Literary Awards, Emily was awarded a Queensland Writers Fellowship for her unpublished novel manuscript ‘Feast’. Emily used the fellowship to work on the novel, including a mentorship through Queensland Writers Centre, as part of the prize’s career development fund, with Miles Franklin and Stella Prize-winning author Evie Wyld. Emily O’Grady is a writer from Brisbane. Her debut novel, The Yellow House won the 2018 Australian/Vogel’s Literary Award and was shortlisted for the 2019 Ned Kelly Award for Best First Fiction. Her work has been published in Meanjin, Kill Your Darlings, The Big Issue fiction edition and New Australian Fiction 2021. Emily has a PhD in Creative Writing and Literary Studies from Queensland University of Technology (QUT). She teaches with the Faber Writing Academy and QUT. Feast is her second novel.