Books
Winner of the Miles Franklin Literary Award 2022
Shortlisted, Victorian Premier's Literary Award for Fiction 2022
Shortlisted, Stella Prize 2022
Shortlisted, Age Fiction Book of the Year 2022
Shortlisted, ASA Barbara Jefferis Award 2022
Shortlisted, Voss Prize 2022
So by the grace of a photograph that had inexplicably gone viral, Tony had found me. Or: he’d found Maggie.
I had no way of knowing whether he was nuts or not; whether he might go to the cops. Maybe that sounds paranoid, but I don’t think it’s so ridiculous. People have gone to prison for much lesser things than accusations of child-killing.
A quiet, small-town existence. An unexpected Facebook message, jolting her back to the past. A history she’s reluctant to revisit: dark memories and unspoken trauma, warning knocks on bedroom walls, unfathomable loss.
She became a new person a long time ago. What happens when buried stories are dragged into the light?
This epic novel from the two-time Sydney Morning Herald Young Novelist of the Year is a masterwork of tragedy and heartbreak—the story of a life in full. Sublimely wrought in devastating detail, Bodies of Light confirms Jennifer Down as one of the writers defining her generation.
Winner, Sydney Morning Herald Young Novelist of the Year 2018
Winner, Readings Prize for New Australian Fiction 2018
Winner, Queensland Literary Award, Steele Rudd Prize 2018
Shortlisted, NSW Premier's Literary Award, Christina Stead Prize for Fiction 2018
The characters in Pulse Points live in small dusty towns, glittering exotic cities and slow droll suburbs; they are mourners, survivors and perpetrators.
In the award-winning 'Aokigahara', a young woman travels to the sea of trees in Japan to say goodbye. In 'Coarsegold', a woman conducts an illicit affair while her recovering girlfriend works the overnight motel shift in the middle of nowhere. In 'Dogs', Foggo runs an unruly gang of bored, cruel boys with a scent for fresh meat. In 'Pressure Okay', a middle-aged man goes to the theatre, gets a massage, remembers his departed wife, navigates the long game of grief with his adult daughter.
Jennifer Down, whose first novel, Our Magic Hour, was commended in the 2017 Victorian Premier’s Literary Award, is a masterful stylist whose sharp eye has been compared to that of Helen Garner. Pulse Points is a gutting collection that showcases a writer of great talent.
Winner, Sydney Morning Herald Young Novelist of the Year 2017
Shortlisted, NSW Premier's Literary Awards (Glenda Adams Award for New Writing) 2017
Shortlisted, Voss Literary Prize 2017
Shortlisted, Victorian Premier's Literary Award for an Unpublished Manuscript 2014
Longlisted, Dobbie Literary Award 2017
Highly Commended, Victorian Premier's Literary Award for Fiction 2017
Audrey, Katy and Adam have been friends since high school—a decade of sneaky cigarettes, drunken misadventures on Melbourne backstreets, heart-to-hearts, in-jokes.
But now Katy has gone. And without her, Audrey is thrown off balance: everything she thought she knew, everything she believed was true, is bent out of shape.
Audrey’s family—her neurotic mother, her wayward teenage brother, her uptight suburban sister—are likely to fall apart. Her boyfriend, Nick, tries to hold their relationship together. And Audrey, caught in the middle, needs to find a reason to keep going when everything around her suddenly seems wrong.
Evocative and exquisitely written, Our Magic Hour is a story of love, loss and discovery. Jennifer Down’s remarkable debut novel captures that moment when being young and invincible gives way to being open and vulnerable, when one terrible act changes a life forever.