*** OUT NOW ***
PICADOR Australia — August 2021
I had a body once before. I didn’t always love it. I knew the skin as my limit, and there were times I longed to leave it.
I knew better than to wish for this.
This is the story of Yun. It’s the story of Adam.
Two young people. A familiar chase.
But this is not a love story.
It’s a story of revenge, transformation, survival.
Feel something, the body commands. Feel this.
But it’s a phantom . . . I go untouched.
They want their body back.
Who are we, if we lose hold of the body?
What might we become?
The Airways shifts between Sydney and Beijing, unsettling the boundaries of gender and power, consent and rage, self and other, and even life and death.
A powerful, inventive, and immersive novel from award-winning author Jennifer Mills.
—BUY THE AIRWAYS online or from your local independent bookshop
—PRAISE FOR THE AIRWAYS:
Sensational. The Airways is an intricate, existential wonder — Mills’ ability to inhabit boundlessness is astonishing. A deeply empathetic genius flows through these pages.
– Josephine Rowe
A haunting and intimate examination of violence, alienation and dislocation, and the need to reckon with the past. The Airways is a masterful novel: Mills writes prose of rare distinction.
– Julie Koh
Mills’ skilful writing is disturbing in its execution, rooted firmly in the physicality of her characters’ worlds… Stunning prose carries the reader…
The Airways is a literary puzzle intent on solving itself. If you feel disoriented reading this book, don’t fight your confusion. Surrender to the journey, like a passenger on a train. Revel in the thinning of reality’s membrane.
– Arts Hub
Jennifer Mills’s The Airways unsettles the boundaries between consciousness, self and the physical world, deep-diving into the parallels between the workings of the human body and the cities we navigate… Questions of consent and bodily autonomy lurk throughout the narrative.
Mesmerising… [a] bravely experimental novel of breakdown and revenge.
– Books+Publishing