What to do with the intensity of longing that occasionally arises? Sometimes I hug my pup so hard he growls. When my pup growls, I realise I need to find some other way of letting off steam. It’s easy to imagine I could just touch myself and be done with it, but no matter how many times I make myself come, that feeling of wanting doesn’t subside. A friend has a term for the need for touch—‘skin hungry’. Lots of people live without sex, but I find it a kind of deprivation.
What does it mean to be awakened? To want? To love? Jessie Cole is in her late thirties when she meets a man twenty years older than she is. They become lovers. Both passionate and companionable, fraught and uneven, their relationship tests her fears and anxieties. Through their interstate affair, through bushfires and the pandemic, she learns about herself, how her initiations into womanhood shaped who she is now, and how the shadow of family trauma still inhabits her body.
Jessie Cole has written an unabashed, thrilling exploration of the very nature of desire, a story about vulnerability and strength, loss and regeneration. A memoir of the body, Desire is a visceral book in which feeling and longing are laid bare.
‘Trust Cole to give us the magic of a deeply embodied book. Prose so vital it seems to breathe and dance from the page. This is a beautiful memoir.’ Sarah Krasnostein, author of The Trauma Cleaner and The Believer
‘Jessie Cole is a delight. I don’t know how she does it. She drags the gnarliest anchors from the heaviest depths and throws light on the hardest of places — her prose shimmers with warmth and breathtaking honesty. Desire is about the mystery of our bodies, how the wiring can get crossed, connections lost and one woman’s delicate unstitching to find herself.’ Anna Krien, author of Act of Grace
Jessie Cole is peerless in Australian letters; for me, she is the master chronicler of hidden psychic spaces. Her exquisite new memoir compels, startles and affirms the arterial centre that is desire.’ Ellena Savage, author of Blueberries
‘Luminous with honesty. Revelatory.’ Nikki Gemmell, author of Dissolve
‘What kind of writer enables the reader to inhabit the author’s body? Jessie Cole can make anything from the curl of a leaf to a broken heart remarkable. No author writes about ecological, bodily and relationship grief as tenderly as she does. In Desire Jessie brings us home to the forest, sharing the beauty, danger and wonderment of this intimate world.’ Laura Jean McKay, author of The Animals in That Country
‘A gorgeous journey of a writer seeking out the inaccessible part of herself, of those she loves, and who love her back, and of the forest that holds them all together. Desire is a book of intellectual and emotional depth, exploring the flesh and nerves and sinew — as a mother, a lover, a friend and soothsayer. A tender joy of a book, about life and death, and of all the great pulls in between. Raw and fascinating writing that shimmers with truth and beauty at once. A confession, a lament, a celebration — I cannot recommend this enough.’ Tara June Winch, author of The Yield
Shortlisted for the Victorian Premier’s Literary Award, 2019
Longlisted, Colin Roderick Award, 2019
As children, Jessie Cole and her brother Jake ran wild, free to roam their rainforest home as they pleased. They had each other, parents who adored them, and two mysterious, beautiful, clever half-sisters, Billie and Zoe, who came to visit every holidays. But when Jessie was on the cusp of adolescence, tragedy struck, and her happy, loving family fell apart.
This heartbreaking memoir asks what happens to those who are left behind when someone takes their own life. It’s about the importance of home, family and forgiveness—and finding peace in a place of pain.
‘A wounded, lovely, luminous book about grief, trauma and the strange healing potential of words.’ Tim Winton
‘A work of shining brilliance.’ Romy Ash
‘Staying aches and pulses with life … Cole is a writer of immense talent.’ Anna Krien
‘Staying is rich and complex – and often surprisingly funny given its dark subject matter. Above all, this memoir is a meditation on what it means to be traumatised by loss, and ultimately to be healed by life.’ Sydney Morning Herald
‘It is a literary achievement, but always a human story. Its message is that life has a tenacious power to draw us out of states of bereavement that, if surrendered to, have the capacity to destroy us entirely … The challenge is the one Cole meets and betters in this lovely, sad, sometimes luminous memoir: to hold the brokenness that grief creates without becoming broken oneself. To find consolation in remaining unconsoled.’ The Weekend Australian
‘Staying is a heartbreaking testament to the despair, helplessness and guilt of those left behind.’ Australian Financial Review
‘This touching memoir from Australian author Jessie Cole, whose childhood was irrevocably changed when her sister committed suicide, offers a rare personal take on unthinkable tragedy.’ Elle
‘When Australia’s cultural narratives insist an artist must leave home to succeed, Cole shows one forged by staying put. She still inhabits her fallen Eden today. It’s surprising that, in the midst of such sorrow, what resounds is a sensation of fecundity. But perhaps it’s not, from a writer of such talent and grace.’ The Saturday Paper
‘Staying is a well-written, extremely moving memoir that steers resolutely clear of stereotypes and self-pity … For all the darkness, there is light too. Cole is a gifted writer with a sensual turn of phrase, and her exploration of the reverberating effects of suicide is both illuminating and absorbing. It will appeal to readers who loved her previous novels.’ Books+Publishing
‘This is a tender book about family, loss and trauma, and it deserves a wide readership.’ Readings Magazine
Novels
The secret things I knew about my mum, and the things that everyone knew, had played in my mind for some time, since I was real little, I guess. When I was small, all around me seemed to flow, gentle and sweet like the quiet edge of the creek. Then my brothers grew too large to be hemmed in, and Sophie met a bloke, moved out and had babies, and things became harder. The older I got the louder those secret things inside me became, all those knowns and unknowns, until – apart from Anja – I’d rather talk to animals than people.
Innocent and unworldly, Mema is still living at home with her mother on a remote, lush hinterland property. It is a small, confined, simple sort of life, and Mema is content with it. One day, during a heavy downpour, Mema saves a stranger from a raging creek. She takes him into her family home, where, marooned by rising floods, he has to stay until the waters recede. His sudden presence is unsettling—for Mema, her mother and her wild friend Anja—but slowly he opens the door to a new world of beckoning possibilities that threaten to sweep Mema into the deep.
“She takes us to a place of the strangest innocence and lovingness … And she takes us to a physical place that’s quite her own, and when you go to her country – the lush but uneasy country inland from Byron Bay – you recognise at once that she’s the voice of it, the country speaks in her voice, though the captivating wise gentleness of that voice belongs only to Jessie.” Peter Bishop
“Deeper Water is a fine and elegantly written novel from an impressive writer.” Weekend Australian
“Deeper Water delivers on its title’s promise of immersion, sensuality, and the liminal … a compelling examination of our relationship with nature.” Australian Book Review
“Cole’s characters are, each one, perfectly drawn examples of flawed and fragile humans, and she evokes the landscape in which she herself grew up and still lives with the tender familiarity of a child for its mother. This is a softly spoken coming-of-age tale that deserves the label tour de force.” North & South Magazine
“Mema’s narrative voice is quiet and measured, never giving very much away but at the same time revealing the immense depth and intensity of her feelings that sit just below the surface. Her longing is mysterious, and Cole’s descriptive prose imbues it with the gloriously sensual anticipation of a bud about to burst into bloom. A compelling and satisfying read; its sensuality and earthiness give a mythical quality to the regional Australian landscape.” Readings
“A fierce momentum tugs the reader by the belt buckle, causing her to flip pages to see when the tension will be finally released. Cole’s talent lies in the depiction of the intangible feelings of a sexual awakening.” Newtown Review of Books
“In literature, and in film, there are some classic plots almost guaranteed to grab the audience’s attention. The Stranger Comes to Town is one, Coming of Age is another and what in England we might call Something Nasty in the Woodshed (a reference to the wonderful novel Cold Comfort Farm) is another. Like a practiced chess master, local Burringbar author Cole, who grew up in relative isolation on a country property, has used all these themes to create a novel that is as deep, chilling and sensuous as the title itself. Her first book, Darkness on the Edge of Town, (which also used the stranger in town device) was good, this one is not just better, it’s extraordinary.” Verandah Magazine
My dad, he collects broken things … Where other people see junk he sees potential … My dad collects broken people too.
Vincent is nearly forty years old, with little to show for his life except his precious sixteen-year-old daughter, Gemma: sensitive, insightful and wise beyond her years.
When a stranger crashes her car outside Vincent and Gemma’s bush home, their lives take a drastic turn. In an effort to help the stranded woman, father and daughter are drawn into a world of unexpected and life-changing consequences.
Darkness on the Edge of Town is a haunting tale that beguiles the reader with its deceptively simple prose, its gripping and unrelenting tensions, and its disturbing yet tender observations.
“One of the stand-out debuts of 2012.” Adelaide Advertiser
“Jessie Cole’s spellbinding first novel is the kind of book that you can describe with words such as ‘beautiful’, ‘touching’ and ‘tender’ as easily as you can with words like ‘uncomfortable’, ‘painful’ and ‘disturbing’ … I read it in nearly one sitting, and I found that hitting the last page was like popping out of a dream; I wondered what might happen to the characters beyond the bounds of the story. I can’t wait to see where this talented new voice takes us next.” 4 and 1/2 stars. Good Reading Magazine
“Jessie Cole’s debut novel Darkness on the Edge of Town is on another level of storytelling altogether … It’s exquisite writing. Graceful, revealing, pitch perfect. Cole is an author who pays sharp attention to the world around her. And she deserves to have the world pay her some attention in return.” The Australian
“A sad and tender tale of the extraordinary events which make up the everyday lives of ordinary people, Darkness on the Edge of Town elegantly expresses the simplicity of emotions that we often find so hard to handle. Unflinching in her capacity to scrape at the raw nerves of our desperation for love, Jessie Cole has written a distinctly Australian story about hope, desire, sexuality, violence and our failure to communicate.” ABC Radio Brisbane
“Jessie Cole writes with the most deceptively simple language. She pulls you into the story and along its threads until bam! She hits you right between the eyes. This is great storytelling. It’s tense, mean, compassionate and very real … The characters are so real it’s as if Cole sat in the pub and copied down everything everyone said. Every minute of reading this book was a joy.” The Hoopla
“Cole is one of a number of younger female writers drawing our attention to lives lived on the margins … She focuses the writer’s eye on an Australia both familiar and hidden, creating stories that make some readers feel uncomfortable. But these are stories essential to our understanding of the Australian landscape and those who inhabit it, where tenderness and violence accompany each other in an eerie pact of necessity. While there is a necessary debate occurring in Australia around the value of literary prizes and who they go to, Jessie Cole has rewarded us instead with a novel that leaves us with much to think about.” Tony Birch, Overland Blog
“Cole’s writing is evocative in its simplicity, the characters’ dialogue – sometimes grimy – as honest and real as Australia can be … A gripping and heartbreaking read.” Readings
“An engaging and thoughtful novel.” Bookseller & Publisher
“A gripping debut novel by NSW writer Cole about the reverberating effects of domestic violence, love, loss and the kindness of strangers, Darkness on the Edge of Town proves difficult to put down as it hurtles towards it confronting conclusion.” 4 stars. Who Weekly
Jessie Cole 