Tender yet Terrifying: Read an Extract from Unsheltered by Clare Moleta

Tender yet Terrifying: Read an Extract from Unsheltered by Clare Moleta

This is how Weather came. They were out in it, the two of them, yelling and laughing till they choked on the rain. Then they were quiet, just standing in it. Dust to mud under their feet and the smell of wet pulling up memories like fish. Li fell against Frank and he licked rain off her. I bloody told you, he said with his mouth on hers. Didn’t I tell you we weren’t going anywhere? Yeah? Well it better stop soon or it’s gunna wash everything away. You’re a hard woman to please. They danced a  bit,  tried to. Slow mud circles with the rain running them together. She couldn’t tell if it was his hair plastered against her forehead or her own. He turned his face up to the rain. Let’s go and get her. They’d talked about it before, tried to imagine what it would be like for Matti the first time, and Li could hear his regret that she wasn’t with them now. But she wanted to go inside with him, wet like they were. Pulled him towards the door with her hands at his belt. And then over his shoulder, she saw  Matti running down the driveway towards them, running hard through the rain as if it was something to shelter from. When she got close enough Li saw that she was crying. It irritated her that Matti was having this reaction, and not the one they’d imagined for her. It’s all right, she said. You don’t have to be scared of it…

Continue reading the extract here…

Reviews

Humanity amongst Desolation: Read our Review of Unsheltered by Clare Moleta

Review | Our Review

25 May 2021

Humanity amongst Desolation: Read our Review of Unsheltered by Clare Moleta

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        Publisher details

        Unsheltered
        Author
        Clare Moleta
        Publisher
        Simon and Schuster
        Genre
        Fiction
        Released
        05 May, 2021
        ISBN
        9781761100758

        Synopsis

        As the resourceful, relentless Li tracks her lost daughter across a disintegrating country, the journey will test the limits of her trust, her hope and her love. Unsheltered will leave you wrung out and gasping. Relentlessly propulsive and profoundly moving, Unsheltered taps into some of our worst fears and most implacable motivations, marking the emergence of a fully-formed and urgent literary voice. Against a background of social breakdown and destructive weather, Unsheltered tells the story of a woman’s search for her daughter. Li never wanted to bring a child into a world like this but now that eight-year-old Matti is missing, she will stop at nothing to find her. As she crosses the great barren country alone and on foot, living on what she can find and fuelled by visions of her daughter just out of sight ahead, Li will have every instinct tested. She knows the odds against her: an uncompromising landscape, an indifferent system, time running out, and the risks of any encounters on the road. But the greatest obstacles of all might be her own uncertainty and the ghosts of her past. Because even if she finds her, how can she hope to shield Matti from what is to come? At times tender, at times terrifying, Unsheltered is an engrossing, unpredictable novel that keeps the reader in suspense all the way to the end. A brilliant feat of imagination that asks if our humanity is the only protection we have left, Unsheltered will affect you in ways a book hasn’t done in years.
        Clare Moleta
        About the author

        Clare Moleta

        Clare Moleta was raised on Whadjuk Noongar Country in Western Australia. Her fiction has been published in literary journals and broadcast on Radio New Zealand, and she has won awards for her travel writing. She has a Writing Diploma from RMIT University and an MA in Creative Writing from Te Herenga Waka | Victoria University of Wellington. She now lives in Poneke | Wellington, Aotearoa, where she was born. Unsheltered is her first novel.

        Books by Clare Moleta

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