Friends &
Dark Shapes
A group of friends moves into a share house in Redfern. They are all on the cusp of thirty and big life changes, navigating insecure employment and housing, second-generation identity, online dating and social alienation—and one of them, our narrator, has just lost her father.
How do you inhabit a space where the landscape is shifting around you, when your sense of self is unravelling? What meaning does time have in the midst of grief?
AvailablE:
AUSTRALIA March
2021
Text publishing
United states
april 2021
europa editions
BLURBS FOR FRIENDS & DARK SHAPES
“Friends and Dark Shapes is a tender look at the myriad ways that a body can hold grief. Kavita Bedford writes lyrically and longingly, imbuing sweetness and darkness throughout. It was a genuine pleasure to read this book; I felt as though I were sitting with a close friend, whispering to each other, sharing close-kept secrets. It made me rethink how loneliness can manifest; how we sometimes hurt ourselves and each other. Friends and Dark Shapes is a real delight and Kavita Bedford is a true talent.”
—Kristen Arnett, author of Mostly Dead Things
“Astonishingly assured and full of razor sharp observations about what it means to live precariously in a changing city. It’s hard to believe this is Bedford’s first novel.”
—Jenny Offill, author of Dept. of Speculation and Weather
“Such a vivid geography: this is a work of smart intensities, witty sorrow and wise coming-to-terms with grief. Astute, wry and beautifully tender.”
—Gail Jones, author of Five Bells
“Friends and Dark Shapes smells and feels and tastes like Sydney, like grief, like the limbo and the lucidity of your twenties. Bedford’s poetic yet sparse, fearless yet gentle prose makes this a book to be savoured.”
—Laura McPhee-Browne, author of Cherry Beach
“An achingly relatable, thought-provoking and compelling debut, full of gorgeous sentences that stopped me in my tracks.”
—Ewa Ramsey, author of The Morbids
“Kavita Bedford gives the gift of brighter eyes. Her prose is sparse yet jewelled, a desert of out-of-the-blue opals and oases.”
—Vivian Pham, author of The Coconut Children
PROJECTS
My major themes of exploration dwell on place—drawing on how the organization of space and architecture are connected with the politics and lived experience of place and urban experience—and the perspective of the ‘outsider’ and migrant voices in literature.
