Thank you to NetGalley and Dutton for the advance copy of this beautiful novel. My god, what a triumph this novel is. I could feel the truthfulness of it in my bones because I've been there. I'm 47 years old, and in some ways, on some days, I'm STILL there. It may be 2025, but being queer still isn't easy. There are plenty of days when I battle against the urge to deny who I am.

A Language of Limbs tells the story of 1972 Australia, two girls, both experiencing queer desire. One gives in, kisses her neighbor, and is promptly ejected from her house (at sixteen!) but her parents. The other is in love with her best friend, but takes the "easy" route - dates boys, goes to the spring formal, represses her authentic self. This is where I wished I'd had this available to me as a teenager so, perhaps, I could have seen that just because you're living life as expected doesn't mean it's easy. In fact, it's miserable. Sometimes authenticity takes time.

There's enough written about this novel to say, without spoiling anything, that the two girls are on a decades-long collision course through a couple of eventful decades in Australia. The journey is moving, heartbreaking, visceral.

My favorite part of this book was the division of chapters into "limb one" and "limb two" as though both stories are part of the same body, the same being. I think that's apt because we've all experienced what both of these girls experience.

My only complaint - and it gets better as the story goes on - but the narration was at bit detached. It took some time to get to know these characters, but I'm glad I made the effort.

This book should be an instant buy/read for everyone. The prose is superb while being intertwined with this beautiful, tragic recount of life in Australia starting in the 70s.

We follow 2 limbs in this story both divergent down different paths after a choice they make as a teenager whether to act on their feelings for their best friend, until they ultimately converge.

Both stories are captivating and intertwining, always leaving you with the feeling of how different a life can be when you choose different parts of yourself to embrace.

I’m excited to see what else Dylin will write because they had such a way with words and with setting the scene and emotions, it transported you into the story.

This is the kind of book that makes me love reading ARCs because it just takes you by surprise how great books can be. I can’t say enough good things about this book!

Thanks to the publisher for the ARC in exchange for a review.

This is why it's so important to write, publish, and read queer books. This book shares the joy, beauty, mess, devastation, and pain of moving through the world as a queer person. I'm baffled by the idea that I had not read about how the AIDS crisis affected countries outside of the US or Africa until I found this book. Books like this, written with so much raw emotion, serve to fuel us when we're faced with constant anti-LGBT laws and propaganda. I am so thankful for this book and I would recommend it to anyone who needs that fuel.

I loved this heartbreakingly beautiful story of love, chosen family, heartbreak, resistance, and hope. I didn’t love the poetry, but I did really appreciate the stylistic risks and choices the author made—some of them absolutely paid off.

This is my kind of literary fiction book I love: a queer story with very descriptive and intimate writing. We follow two women from when they are young in the 70s and one girl chooses to be out as queer and the other chooses to suppress it.

I felt this story to my soul and I loved the writing style - it almost felt like I was being told this story out loud and this was one of the first time that a book that didn’t have quotation marks made sense to me. I actually felt like it added a lot to my experience. This is your warning though that it didn’t have quotation marks because I know a lot of people do not like that. I could see this being an amazing audiobook though if you wanted to go that route. Some might say this was overwritten and had too lyrical of writing but I don’t think so.

The only complaint I have is in the beginning the two storylines didn’t feel extremely unique but once I figured it out that it was two separate people I didn’t have a hard time with it.

I highly recommend this! A solid 4.5 star read.

✨ A Language of Limbs follows two queer women—strangers to each other—living in Australia. In alternating chapters, we follow the lives of these women as they navigate romance, grief, loss, and the AIDS crisis. Spanning three decades, A Language of Limbs is both a coming of age story and a story of loss. ✨

Review:

A Language of Limbs felt both familiar and a stranger. On the former, A Language of Limbs includes several common tropes found in queer media set in the late 20th century: the case of being closeted, the widespread grief and anguish that arose during the AIDS crisis, and the found family trope associated with the queer community.

This is not to say that I didn’t enjoy this novel because of this familiarity. However, it can be seen a bit overdone in the media space for some. Nonetheless, I enjoyed the story. It was both touching and poignant as it touches on many important subjects. You can also just feel the love poured into the book by the author, and I think that is worth praising. I would love this story to be adapted.

However, I did have one minor problem with the book and that was the writing style. At certain points, I felt the prose was too flowery and tried to be something it didn’t need to be. Combined with the dual POVs, I wished the story was executed in a more conventional way to be palatable for general audiences given it touches on many important themes.

Read this if you are into:
💚 queer literary works
💚 queer romances
💚 poetry

Would I read it again? Yes

This was not a book I would have picked up on my own. Thank you to Dutton Books for the opportunity to read this book early :) This book follows two queer people and in the book they are labelled as "limb one" and "limb two" at first this bothered me because we don't get their names at all (which I'm guessing is the point) As I continued on with the story it reminded me of the show Pose and how in one perspective there was a safe house that queer people was able to go. I loved the writing in this story and how the chapters were fairly short so it was easy to breeze through. This book touches on the AIDS pandemic, queer love, found family, and lost love.

so take my opinion with a grain of salt here bc this has overwhelmingly positive reviews which made me so excited to get into this one! unfortunately i had to dnf about halfway through - i’m sure there’s a great story in here and i did enjoy learning about Australia during this time but i just did NOT vibe with this writing at all. the prose was more purple than barney the dinosaur and it just came across overwrought and pretentious in a way that had me rolling my eyes. this one worked for a lot of people apparently but i was not the guy for it!

Hello to my favorite book of the year so far!! I’d heard this book is absolutely gorgeous and emotional and devastating and yeah.. everyone was RIGHT!!

This novel follows two Aussie girls growing up in the 80s, told in alternating perspectives. They both understand their queerness in different ways, and we see how their paths diverge and come closer throughout the novel.

Hardcastle’s writing is so immediate, poetic, and evocative. I was locked in, experiencing everything alongside our main characters. The writing feels so visceral and anchored in the body in such a gorgeous way.

I also loved how art is woven into the story. Sometimes it can be a bit cringe when a character’s art is described in a novel, but I thought the creative process & poetry included in the novel were really well done. It added a special kind of energy to the story that I loved.

This is a beautiful story about love, family, grief, sacrifice, and having the strength to be yourself in a world that oftentimes doesn’t accept or respect you. Definitely check out the trigger warnings before diving into this one, but if/when you do, be prepared for the best book EVER!

Thank you to NetGalley and Penguin Group Dutton for an ARC of A Language of Limbs by Dylin Hardcastle in exchange for my honest review.

A Language of Limbs is a truly beautiful and heartbreaking story about being queer and coming-of-age in 1970s and 1980s. Told in alternating POVs of limb 1 and limb 2, narrators who have withheld their names, we experience, through lyrical, captivating prose, how each individual’s choice regarding their sexuality during adolescence, plays out as they enter adulthood.

Although the setting for this novel is Australia in the 70s and 80s, the themes throughout this book are universal and timely, while also imbued with a sense of nostalgia. Our lead characters, along with a fascinating cast of side characters take us through a myriad of queer life challenges including loneliness, otherness, hate crimes, job discrimination, and the AIDS epidemic. But we also experience on a quite visceral level, the profound love and friendship shared in a world that has tried to deny and punish their existence.

I was completely engrossed in this story. The creative and unique structure, along with the lack of quotation marks, sometimes threw me off balance, but I was perfectly fine with that, because this is a story in which we are to feel like we are toppling over and then righting ourselves, alongside our characters. No matter what was happening in my day, the minute I opened my book into the life of either limb 1 or limb 2, I was immediately right there with them again. Hardcastle’s prose is absolutely exquisite, while still being accessible. I could not put this book down.

The ending was beautiful, although abrupt. I was left wanting more, but also felt content, and wishing for only good things for our main characters. A Language of Limbs is a book that will long stay with me. Although the themes and content may be difficult to read, and for some the prose may lean too poetic, I loved it! This is a story that needs to be widely read.

One of the most heartbreaking and breathtaking books I've ever read. I ached for these characters. Completely blew me away.

this was beautifully written though at times, to the point that it felt overdone. however, there is so much heart and emotion in this that it's almost as if the only way to have explained any of the characters or their stories, was that way. i was a bit confused until about half way through when i realized that the "then" and "now" pov's were separate pov's and not from the same person so that totally threw me off. felt a bit chaotic in that way but perhaps that was the point of it all. definitely read like a debut but again, such beautiful prose.

This was a beautiful coming of ag queer story set in the late 70s/80s in Australia.
The prose is very poetic and lyrical, and even though it felt a little overwritten in places, it still was achingly good and emotional overall.
The love conveyed was beautiful and powerful, and I enjoyed that "limb 2" found her strength at the end.
The format took me a minute to understand, but I was so engrossed at the end as the journeys of the two "limbs" found their way to each other.

Really gorgeous prose and interesting concept --- i am not sure if I fully understood the ending, but i think the parallels drawn throughout the book with claude and marcel are really cool.

limb one was unsurprisingly my favorite, and i felt like limb two's story hadn't really ended yet. while limb one had a clear place to move on from and some closure, limb two felt like she still didn't understand the full breadth of her self. i liked the swimming descriptions for her though!

the name symbolism was very cool and the hiding of the names ('little dave' being a nickname for limb one for most of the book) until the conclusion made for a fascinating reveal.

This book is absolutely breathtaking. It makes really effective use of a split pov structure, using it to highlight the different ways that queerness impacts someone’s life. The plot and pacing of this book are well-done and the characters are written very well. This book weaves poetry throughout the story and has some of the most beautiful prose I have read. This book is emotional and insightful and really packs a punch.

5⭐️ I’m not usually a fan of poetic prose but this has absolutely changed my mind. This story is so beautifully tragic and memorable. I loved how seamlessly the stories are intertwined. I always where I needed to be. It’s a book that requires you to be present but it’s hard not to be.

Review posted to StoryGraph and Goodreads on 5/25/25. Review will be posted to Amazon on release date.

An achingly beautiful story following two lives that go down different paths spanning decades. When two young girls are found being physically intimate their lives takes two paths. Limb one is attacked by her parents and flees to find a life where she is able to bloom into her truest self with help from her community and found family. We get to see her grow, find love, create art, and experience great loss. Limb two’s life goes on in a quite “normal” way where she goes to school, meets a man, gets married, and tries to start a family but all along there is secret longing beneath the surface.

This book was absolutely phenomenal. It’ll break your heart in the most devastating way. The writing is lyrical and rich. I appreciated the structure of watching the two girls in separate chapters and seeing how their lives interact. I also appreciated the care that the author took in writing about the AIDS epidemic. There’s a genuine terror that’s expressed but also a resilience of the characters choosing to live for themselves and their community. I know that this is a book that I will be thinking about for a long time.

Special thanks to NetGalley and PENGUIN GROUP Dutton | Dutton for the ARC copy they provided.

Unfortunately, I did not finish this book in time to leave a review before the publication date, and though a review after publication is no less welcome or useful, I feel I do not have the time or space to give this book the attention it deserves.

Though I did not manage to finish A Language of Limbs before its publication, I look forward to reading it at my leisure some time in the future.

In this sapphic novel, we learn about the time during the AIDS epidemic and how filtered one must have been when they found themselves attracted to the same sex, not only to everyone around them, but to themselves. We see firsthand the shame and guilt brought upon by the stigma that surrounded the disease.

I really enjoyed how realistic this book was, the women didn't gawk or stray away from what they wanted. They simply cut themselves off for it because they felt like they couldn't have each other, couldn't have happiness. This book also felt like reading poetry. Hardcastle does a good job at not putting literary obstacles in front of the plot or feeling they are trying to give us for the sake of detail. Although this novel is based in 1972, the shame the women are experiencing feels similar to what many LGBTQIA+ people feel today.

I highly recommend this book for readers who are learning to not only accept themselves, but accept their loved ones for stepping out of the status quo.

What to expect:
- Yearning
- Forbidden Lust

I let this book consume me, body and soul. Though this book is short, it does not fail to give you the chance to look upon yourself and those around you and reflect on who you are and who you want to be. I loved the two perspectives and the entirely different experiences one can have when it comes to their identity, relationships, and the bonds they can build and break. You are journeying with both of your main characters, wanting the best but expecting the worst as they struggle through life and acceptance of being a member of the LGBTQ+ community. I will easily be recommending this to anyone and everyone who needs a coming of age story or even just a book that allows you to reflect on who you are.