Published in 2017
240 pages
Jennifer Down is a writer and editor from Melbourne. Her work has appeared in the Sydney Morning Herald, the Saturday Paper, the Lifted Brow and Overland. Her first novel is Our Magic Hour (2016). ‘Aokigahara’ won the 2014 ABR Elizabeth Jolley Short Story Award.
What is this book about?
The characters in Jennifer Down’s Pulse Points live in small dusty towns, glittering exotic cities and slow droll suburbs; they are mourners, survivors and perpetrators.
In the award-winning ‘Aokigahara’, a young woman travels to the sea of trees in Japan to say goodbye. In ‘Coarsegold’, a woman conducts an illicit affair while her recovering girlfriend works the overnight motel shift in the middle of nowhere. In ‘Dogs’, Foggo runs an unruly gang of bored, cruel boys with a scent for fresh meat. In ‘Pressure Okay’ a middle-aged man goes to the theatre, gets a massage, remembers his departed wife, navigates the long game of grief with his adult daughter.
