Longlisted for the 2024 Stella Prize
Kate Mildenhall – The Hummingbird Effect
Fiction · Scribner Australia (an imprint of Simon & Schuster Australia)
About the Book
One of the lucky few with a job during the Depression, Peggy’s just starting out in life. She’s a bagging girl at the Angliss meatworks in Footscray, a place buzzing with life as well as death, where the gun slaughterman Jack has caught her eye – and she his.
How is her life connected to Hilda’s, almost a hundred years later, locked inside during a plague, or La’s, further on again, a singer working shifts in a warehouse as her eggs are frozen and her voice is used by AI bots? Let alone Maz, far removed in time, diving for remnants of a past that must be destroyed? Is it by the river that runs through their stories, eternal yet constantly changing – or by the mysterious Hummingbird Project, and the great question of whether the march of progress can ever be reversed?
“The Hummingbird Effect is speculative fiction at its finest: inventive, mind-expanding and wonderfully ambitious.”
– 2024 Stella Prize Judges
About the Author
Kate Mildenhall
Kate Mildenhall is a writer and teacher. Her debut novel, Skylarking, was named in Readings Top Ten Fiction Books of 2016 and her bestselling The Mother Fault was longlisted for the 2021 ABIA General Fiction Book of the Year and shortlisted for the 2020 Aurealis Awards. Mildenhall teaches creative writing and co-hosts The First Time podcast – which features conversations with Australian writers – and is currently undertaking a PhD in creative practice at RMIT University. Kate lives in Hurstbridge on Wurundjeri lands, with her partner and two children. Her third novel is The Hummingbird Effect.
Further Reading
Reviews
“Mildenhall’s vision of humanity’s future feels gentler than some of the more bruising speculations across pop culture, although she’s no less critical.” Bec Kavanagh, The Guardian
“The novel is a testament to the strength and struggle of people of marginalised genders existing within a capitalist and patriarchal system across several centuries.” Laura Pettenuzzo, ArtsHub
Links
Read an extract of The Hummingbird Effect in Kill Your Darlings.
Louise Limm interviewed Kate Mildenhall for AEUNews. Read it here.
Judges’ Report
A bold novel that asks big questions about how we live and die together.
The Hummingbird Effect is speculative fiction at its finest: inventive, mind-expanding and wonderfully ambitious. Via a series of interlinked plotlines that move from the Great Depression of the 1930s to the ravaged landscapes of the 22nd century, Kate Mildenhall tackles the headline issues of our age: labour rights, consumer capitalism, artificial intelligence, fertility and IVF, family violence, lockdown loneliness, aged care and family violence.
A natural storyteller who has come into her power, Mildenhall is unafraid to take risks with narrative and form. The result is an energising book that hums with creativity and gestures towards new possibilities for Australian fiction. This is a novel that moves with ease between small canvas and big picture. Never didactic and often thrilling, The Hummingbird Effect deftly reveals the entanglements of past, present and future.
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