When she and her siblings get wind of Buckley’s plot, ripples of revolutionary fervour begin to mobilise the local Indigenous community, but they also dredge up the traumatic roots of the Salter siblings’ dysfunctional childhood and disaffected adulthood. Prodigal daughter Kerry has avoided home, her family and prison for years, but returns to Durrongo on a stolen motorbike, freshly single. The Salter family is in crisis: Pop Owen Addison, their respected, powerful, violent patriarch, is dying and Jim Buckley, Patterson’s bent mayor and greedy real-estate cowboy, has designs on Salter ancestral country. Too Much Lip returns readers to Bundjalung country in Northern New South Wales and brilliantly showcases Lucashenko’s talent for constructing funny, fraught and powerful stories driven by complex characters and compelling, true-to-life dramas. Melissa Lucashenko’s last novel, Mullumbimby, opened me up to a conversation about feminism, culture and land rights that has stayed with me for years, so I was excited to read her new book.

Gritty and darkly hilarious, Too Much Lip offers redemption and forgiveness where none seems possible. And the unexpected arrival on the scene of a good-looking dugai fella intent on loving her up only adds more trouble - but then trouble is Kerry’s middle name. Old family wounds open as the Salters fight to stop the development of their beloved river. She quickly discovers, though, that Bundjalung country has a funny way of grabbing on to people. Kerry plans to spend twenty-four hours, tops, over the border. But now her Pop is dying and she’s an inch away from the lockup, so she heads south on a stolen Harley. Wise-cracking Kerry Salter has spent a lifetime avoiding two things - her hometown and prison. The avalanche of bullshit in the world would drown her if she let it the least she could do was raise her voice in anger.

And the older she got, the harder it seemed to get to swallow her opinions. Too much lip, her old problem from way back. Winner of the Miles Franklin Literary Award 2019

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