Dark Star

Born under a dark star, Nancy Pringle, never knew her father’s identity, and was abandoned by her mother. The novel follows Nancy as she navigates adolescence and adulthood, while encountering society’s marginalised in her search both for her father and her self.

Under Lorna Moon’s forensic gaze, small community life's conventions and hypocrisies are examined in minute and wry detail. And through Nancy’s growing understanding of her own desire, Moon is able to analyse female sexuality at a time when to do so was revolutionary. ‘It is revolting to me’, Moon wrote in a letter, ‘that in a civilised world a woman’s virtue rests entirely upon her hymen.’* With Dark Star, Moon works through her outrage.

*cited by Dr Glenda Norquay