Chloe Wilson’s hotly anticipated debut novel, The Thornbacks, is a beautifully wrought response to the peculiar, often cruel ways bodies accrue social and cultural value. This story of two unrelated “sisters”, brought together by the marriage of their parents, is playful, witty, astute and compelling – but while the sentences sting and delight in equal measure, the plot is stretched a little too thin.

Wilson’s searing collection of extraordinary tales, Hold Your Fire, was a rightful winner of the NSW Premier’s Literary Award for New Writing in 2022. She has a string of other well deserved accolades to her name, including the Commonwealth Short Story Prize shortlist, and the Iowa Review Fiction Prize.

Clearly a masterful storyteller, Wilson is capable of poignant, haunting prose that quivers with unnerving humour and unsettling observations.

“I knew it was her before she turned around,” she writes in Tongue-Tied, from her volume of short stories. “Gym teachers, unlike other teachers, don’t know their students seated and face-forward. We know their proportions, their ratio of muscle to fat, the smell of their feet, of their unwashed groins and underarms. We know their limits.”

But her first book-length work, while expertly conceived, suffers from a slight lack of narrative backbone. It would arguably have fared better as a long short story, or even a novella.

Review: The Thornbacks – Chloe Wilson (Hamish Hamilton)

The premise is promising. Gertie and Tabitha are the same age and have grown up together within a dysfunctional blended family. Some of the details are unclear, particularly concerning........

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