Four books, eleven territories, eight languages.

Sweeping across decades and tracing love, loss, protest, and survival, A Language of Limbs is an achingly beautiful meditation on identity, fate, and the countless lives we carry within us.

Electric Lit

Hardcastle handily crafts two distinct voices for the alternating story lines, revealing the ripple effects of choosing one path over another. It’s a captivating display of how one decision can shape a life.

Publishers Weekly (starred)

Vivid and poignant, with flashes of the experimental and poetic, the novel serves as a record of queer life in Australia in the ’70s and ’80s and asks us to consider how and why we love.

Booklist

A wholly original novel akin to Sylvia Plath’s “fig tree” analogy… A Language of Limbs is heartbreaking and poignant.

USA Today

This novel, which follows two queer people whose lives unexpectedly intersect, is one of the most poetically written books I’ve read in a long time. You will smile and cry with these characters as they figure out their identity, fall in love and experience devastating loss.

Myles Sexton

A Language of Limbs is a queer novel in vital, masterful conversation with itself, and Hardcastle’s visceral, propulsive prose inexorably and generously draws the reader into this conversation—about the violence of metamorphosis, the joyful confusion between self and other, and all the ways we strive to create meaning on the spectrum between chance and destiny. This book will stay with you.

Olivia Wolfgang-Smith, author of Mutual Interest

A Language of Limbs is an ecstatic world of a queer love story. Hardcastle’s vivid prose transported me to a queer past and future rooted in community and love, even amid grief. Sprawling yet exquisitely intimate.

Jules Ohman, author of Body Grammar

Visceral and provocative. Mind-blowing and awe-inspiring. A fantastic achievement.

Soula Emmanuel, author of Wild Geese

Dylin’s writing is deeply evocative, sensual, and profound… I would love to read [A Language of Limbs], as if for the first time, again and again and again.

Ella Baxter, author of Woo Woo, for Shelf Awareness

Dylin Hardcastle’s novel carried me away like a tidal current. Expansive across time, yet intimate in its focus, A Language of Limbs is that rare book that’s equally poetic and propulsive—with twin protagonists who are impossible to shake. Nothing short of an instant queer classic.

Benjamin Law, author of Gaysia

Poetic, fresh and mesmerising, Hardcastle’s work is like nothing I have ever read. A Language of Limbs is full of feeling; a love story about the family we make ourselves. Upon finishing this book I was overwhelmed by a sense of, more. I am desperate for more stories like this.

Jessie Stephens, author of Heartsick

A life-affirming, deeply-felt novel of the decisions we make and the lives that unspool from them. To read A Language of Limbs is to be reminded of the power of queer joy and community. I loved it.

Hannah Kent, author of Burial Rites

An epic tale of Sapphic pleasure, pain and activism.

The Big Issue (Australia)

Tender and steamy . . . [A] story of aching almost, deep grief and exuberant joy that will appeal to readers of Emily Danforth and Jeanette Winterson . . . Hardcastle writes with all sensual faculties and earnestly depicts the full-on force of female desires.

Books and Publishing (Australia)

The novel is written with the confidence of an experienced storyteller, someone who understands pace, and the importance of leaving space in a text. [...] If boys will be boys then, it would appear, men will be men. Yet, all this heavy drama is presented with a light touch, the plot is exacting, and the characters are blazingly strong.

The Sydney Morning Herald / The Age (Louise Swinn)

Richly descriptive yet easy to read, Below Deck’s poetic style is one that reaches out and pulls you in from page one. Unafraid and armed with lyrical turns of phrase, Hardcastle doesn’t tackle the murky lines between consent and abuse, memory and reality, so much as sit alongside them, and encourage the reader to do the same. The result is a novel humming with tension between beautiful prose and uncomfortable questions.

New Zealand Herald

The writing is poetic yet accessible - remarkably, it is a quick read. The story is harrowing yet human. The characters, even the minor ones, are alive on the page, yet are serving Hardcastle's higher purpose, which is very definitely a political one.

The Canberra Times

Hardcastle’s sense of the natural world – of what it means to be at one with the ocean, and of the intrinsic, grandeur of Antarctica – reverberates in every sentence.

The Australian

Below Deck is a rich, powerful, and wonderful novel full of exquisite writing, important themes, and powerfully realised textures.

Compulsive Reader

Olivia has synaesthesia, which makes for rich and evocative scenes that can jump off the page. But Below Deck will also disturb you and shows how one drop-in-the-ocean moment can have a deep impact on a life.

Herald Sun

Below Deck is a remarkably ambitious novel. Its chapters span an arc of emotions, people, landscapes and lands. And Oli, who tells her own story, tells it in language, which is often poetic, imaginative and allusive.

Newtown Review of Books

Hardcastle’s poetic prose carries the protagonist from joyous dreams ‘in swirls of violet and Prussian blue’ to a traumatised ‘sick yellow’ silence and ultimately to a choice; whether or not to breathe.

North and South Review, ‘The Best of the Month’, New Zealand

As timely as it is evocative, Below Deck's polychromatic depiction of trauma and its aftermath speaks to how women learn to inhabit their bodies and the world, and how those dark lessons can be triumphantly unlearned.

Beejay Silcox, Australian literary critic

A new voice has emerged in Australian fiction with one of the most highly anticipated books of the year. Hardcastle’s Below Deck is a tender, poetic, almost hypnotic coming of age story. […] It’s impossible not to be affected by this book.

Ben Hunter, The Booktopian

The savagery of its subject belies the beauty of its writing. It’s a powerful, unforgettable synthesis; a painfully page-turning read, a vividly three-dimensional, lacerating dissection of female abuse at the hands of men. […] Fierce, poetic and uncompromising. There’s a lot of hype surrounding Hardcastle’s Below Deck. It’s warranted.

Simon McDonald, bookseller & critic

Hardcastle’s unique way of seeing the world (like Oli, she has synesthesia which means she hears in colour) is channelled through her writing with unflinching grace. It is a gripping, breathless read.

Women’s Agenda

The most interesting element of the novel is not only Hardcastle’s sophisticated negotiation of the politics of consent, but her depiction of the broader social structures of power, which surround the narrative events as a whole.

Catherine Noske, Feminist Writer’s Festival

Lyrical, profound, and deeply moving Hardcastle's Below Deck will confront as well as soothe, and is the most tender, hopeful battle-cry of a book.

Brooke Davis, author

Hardcastle has captured the powerful words so many of us struggle to find, and I cannot imagine anyone could finish Below Deck unaffected.

Bri Lee, author

Tender, moving, frightening. This is an author unafraid to leave an absence for the unsaid; unafraid of silence.

Cass Moriarty, author

[Below Deck] is a masterpiece. Breathtaking, gripping, haunting and so beautifully crafted that I continually found myself re-reading pages and paragraphs just to relive their glory. Its author, Sophie Hardcastle, is not even 30. Frankly, her talent is frightening.

Georgie Dent, author

The free-flowing intensity of the wind and waves that drives her characters' lives, also powers Hardcastle's memorable prose. Her writing sweeps us through hemispheres and across oceans with astonishing and immersive force. This is a deeply moving story of a young woman growing up, and Hardcastle is an extraordinary talent.

Elleke Boehmer, University of Oxford