Shortlisted for the 2024 Stella Prize
Emily O’Grady – Feast
Fiction · Allen & Unwin
About the Book
Alison is an actress who no longer acts, Patrick a musician past his prime. The eccentric couple live an isolated, debauched existence in an old manor house in Scotland, a few miles outside their village. That is, until Patrick’s teenage daughter, Neve, flees Australia to spend a year abroad with her doting, if unreliable, father, and the stepmother she barely knows.
On the weekend of Neve’s eighteenth birthday, her father insists on a special feast to mark her coming of age. Despite Neve’s objections, her mother Shannon arrives in Scotland to join the celebrations. What none of them know is that Shannon has arrived with a hidden agenda that has the potential to shatter the delicate façade of the loving, if dysfunctional, family.
Feast is the story of three women connected beyond blood, and what happens when their darkest secrets are hauled into the light.
“Told from the perspectives of three connected women, Feast reminds us not so much to be wary of unreliable narrators, but of the deep subjectivity of moral value.”
– 2024 Stella Prize Judges
About the Author
Emily O’Grady
Emily O’Grady is a writer from Brisbane. Her debut novel, The Yellow House won the 2018 Australian/Vogel’s Literary Award and was shortlisted for the 2019 Ned Kelly Award for Best First Fiction. Her work has been published in Meanjin, Kill Your Darlings, The Big Issue fiction edition and New Australian Fiction 2021.
Further Reading
Reviews
“Feast excels as a character study, gradually exposing the monstrosity of the inhabitants of the manor house.” Ilona Urquhart, Books + Publishing
“Feast deals in liminal spaces more than the absolute, capturing the complex tensions between life and death, good and bad.” Bec Kavanagh, The Guardian
“Feast is an unsettling and gritty tale of a family that is connected by something far darker and thicker than blood.” Aurelia Orr, Readings
Judges’ Report
A perfect jewel of a novel.
In Feast, O’Grady deploys a tight quorum of characters to the Scottish Highlands for the novel’s titular meal, bringing together the quintessential “mixed blessing” family. While events take place over a few brief days, the story unearths complexities, secrets, derelictions and joys that span decades and occupy the seamy continuum between good and evil, dignity and contempt, life and death. Told from the perspectives of three connected women, Feast reminds us not so much to be wary of unreliable narrators, but of the deep subjectivity of moral value, the unsettling implication that we are – each of us – capable of committing and condoning so much, without ever abandoning our complex humanity and undeniable fragility.
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