You can buy Imago from Spinifex Press.

‘Imago is a great restless read, punchy and quirky and indescribably tender.’

Diva, UK

‘Imago is a disquieting powerful, beautifully crafted exploration of a woman’s coming of age. Told in a series of flashbacks, it is the story of Molly Rose Moone’s painful emigration and ultimate acclamation to the harsh Australian landscape and the strange, overwhelming love for the woman who becomes her mentor. Imago is as compelling as it is disturbing.’

ACT Book of the Year report

‘The transferences of female imagery to the landscape (a tremendously difficult device to use newly) are among the best I’ve read. The fluctuations and magnitudes of individual interpersonal electricity are also conveyed with great respect and art.’

Jennifer Maiden, Overland

‘This is a tender, delicate story of uneasy relationships sharpened by geographical and cultural disjunction, and the careful sifting of hitherto core beliefs to survive.’

Otago Daily Times, New Zealand

‘The suburban yards of the two women [Molly and Marj] are beautifully drawn by Rendle-Short, and the interiors of their houses become ritual territory in a way that very few writers of fiction care to do, or can do. The strangeness of reterritorialisation permeates the story.’

Rosemary Sorensen, Courier Mail

‘Rendle-Short’s language is visual and sensual. Marj’s physicality — everything from her voice, her hands in the mixing bowl, her fingers working the soil in her garden — becomes suggestive of Molly’s yearning which is neither overtly sexual nor romantic but rather a desire for transformation.’

Anne Coombs, Weekend Australian

‘Imago is a finely crafted, moving and challenging novel that deserves to be read widely. It is poetic, joyous, gently erotic and decidedly affirmative.’

David Vickers, The Canberra Review

‘I trust that readers will be seduced by Marj, by her voice singing “Sweet River”, her laughter and her stomping, her cups of tea, her flowers and vegetables, by Molly too, by her eye for the perfect fit, her craft, her lust for learning the simple things that matter, finally by the narrative’s imagery which is all food and water and sunshine and bright colours and maggots that become flies, relentlessly, endlessly.’

Dominique Hecq, Australian Women’s Book Review

‘Imago is a beautiful, poetic and thoughtful novel on love, obsession and metamorphosis, It is a brave and adventurous first novel.’

Smithsdiffering

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Image: linocut of a fly by Fiona Edge reprinted with permission