A Language of Limbs

One of TIME’s 100 Must-Read Books of 2025
Longlisted for the Stella Prize
Shortlisted for Dymocks Book of the Year 2024 in Australia

Most Anticipated by OUT Magazine, LGBTQ Reads, Book Riot, The Nerd Daily and Autostraddle

“Hardcastle imbues the book with poetry, history, and visual art, offering a love letter to the Australian queer community.”
—TIME

“Heartbreaking and not to be forgotten.”
—USA Today, “Best Books of the Year”

“A vivid and poignant novel about one choice that changes everything.”
—E! News

“A celebration of queer resilience and romantic possibility, it’s the rare sapphic novel that’s both tender and revolutionary.”
—Pride Source

“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

“[A Language of Limbs is] like gay, literary Sliding Doors. And it’s told in gorgeous, often fragmentary prose.”
—Autostraddle

“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 is an exquisite thing, burning with desire.”
—2025 Stella Prize Judges

“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)