Author Talk: Madeleine Gray with Chosen Family

Join Madeleine Gray, bestselling author of Green Dot, as she discusses her new novel Chosen Family.

A bold, romantic, queer and epic literary novel for all readers, Chosen Family is a story about friendship that reads like a love story.

Nell Argall and Eve Bowman are both brilliant, odd and friendless. Traumatised in their first year of high school, their lives change forever when they meet. Set in Sydney over eighteen years, the novel follows Nell and Eve as they grow into themselves – loving and hurting each other along the way.

From school to university, to careers and motherhood, their relationship is at once a life-raft, a poison apple and a Medusan stare, frozen in time. Love, guilt, shame and joy twist between them as they grapple with betrayal, connection and the mystery of what lies inside another person’s heart.

Written with Gray’s trademark compassion, wit and dark humour, Chosen Family is a modern classic in the making.

About the author:

Madeleine Gray is a writer and critic from Sydney. She has written arts criticism for SRB, Overland, Meanjin, The Saturday Paper, The Monthly etc. In 2019 she was a CA-SRB Emerging Critic, and in 2021 she was a finalist for the Walkley Pascall Prize for Arts Criticism, a finalist for the Woollahra Digital Literary Non-fiction award, and a recipient of a Neilma Sidney Literary Travel grant. Madeleine has a PhD in feminist literary theory from the University of Manchester, an MSt in English from the University of Oxford and a Bachelor of Arts in English Literature and Art History from the University of Sydney. She is the author of Green Dot.