Hembury Books Publishes Fiction And Non-Fiction Books.
Harm None
- 15/04/2025
- Gay Lynch
- Fiction, Young Adult
Blurb
Garnet Southwood lives by the river with her mercurial mother Raven and Wiccan grandmother Ebba in a cottage overgrown with ancient herbs and trees.
Threefold events disturb their peaceful solitude. A neighbour confronts their love of nature with intrusive photography, mewling birds, and mysterious dark trade.
Visions of a boy appear on Raven’s computer screen. Even more unsettling, someone hacks in from a Scottish server, perhaps her ancestors, sending inexplicably violent film-clips that vanish without trace.
In the noughties, life is hard for nocturnal teenagers who message, ride in cars and attend friends’ funerals. How far will Garnet have to run to save her sanity?
Retreating more and more online, where the past and present begin to collide, Garnet must face the long shadow of her father and long-gone ancestors, before she’s pulled into a mysterious web that connects her to the dark history of 16th-century witch hunts.
Author Bio
Gay Lynch writes essays, novels, hybrid memoir pieces, academic papers, book reviews and short stories on unceded Bunurong land, part of the Kulin nation. An independent researcher in creative writing and English, she works adjunct to Flinders University. Deep engagement with place, history and marginalised voices drives her writing.
Essays and stories by Lynch appear in anthologies such as Best Australian Stories and Growing Up in Country Australia, and in Australia’s finest literary journals, for instance, Meanjin and Griffith Review. FISH Publishing Ireland has longlisted Lynch’s fiction and memoir pieces four times.
Hebe’s Lament and Other Stories is her first story collection. The lead and title story won the 2024 American Association of Australasian Literary Studies Prize for Creative Prose. Lynch judged this prize in 2025.
Other publications include Harm None (2025), a YA novel originally shortlisted for the Adelaide Festival Literary Award for an Unpublished Manuscript. In 2019 she published Unsettled, a settler novel mentored by Irish literary writer Niall Williams. Her first adult novel, Cleanskin (2005), benefitted from a South Australian Writers Centre prize mentorship with Eva Hornung (then Sallis).
In 2023, Lynch chaired and presented sessions for the Australian Short Story Festival and the International Conference on Short Story in English, and Asia-Pacific Writers and Translators commissioned ‘In-Train’, which she read at the Ubud Readers and Writers Festival launch of Pratik Magazine’s Australian issue.