“I chose the jagged rocks, the broken bones, the spattered brains. I chose beauty. I'd choose it again.”
Luna Lewis is white. But her friends aren’t, nor are her brothers, nor her one-time Princess of Indonesia–finalist stepmother. After transforming from pudgy preteen to ‘exotic’ beauty, Luna reinvents herself as ‘Luna Lu’ and takes her ticket out of the most isolated city on earth. However, as her international modelling career approaches its expiry date, Luna must grapple with what she’s sacrificed — and who she’s become — in her mission to conquer the world.
Featuring an intersecting cast of glamour-hungry public schoolgirls, WAGs, mining heiresses, backpacker-barmaids, and cosmetic nurses, West Girls examines beauty, race, class divisions, and social mobility in Australia’s richest state. It’s also a devastating catalogue of the myriad, inventive ways in which women love and hurt one another.
Praise for West Girls
“West Girls shows us a sordid, self-regarding, and shiny world of schoolgirls and supermodels, and in any other lesser writer's hands this would be straight parody, but Woollett's extraordinary talent is to make the “real” more grotesque than the satire, and to infuse every sentence with her poet's vision and every character with a true melancholy and flawed humanity.”
ALICE PUNG
“The beginning teases us with fast-paced, colourful snapshots of culturally diverse characters and scenes: mother–daughter adventures, unconventional family models, teen politics, and preoccupation with appearances. As we read further, however, the story gets more unsettling. West Girls dissects the idea of beauty — Indah, as the protagonist’s stepmother’s name suggests — at the intersection of power, privilege, and exploitation: who’s exploiting and who’s being exploited? Woollett takes the theme of ‘becoming’ to the darker side; whilst subverting assumptions of fixed identities, she poses uneasy questions around cultural appropriation, racially and sexually structured gaze under capitalism, and disciplined bodies.”
INTAN PARAMADITHA
“What a talent! It’s rare indeed to find a book this intelligent and this wickedly addictive. West Girls is dark as a mining magnate’s soul, cackle-out-loud funny, and so smart it stings. Ah-mazing!”
EMILY BITTO
“[A] composite novel of cleverly interconnected short stories, à la Elizabeth Strout’s Olive Kitteridge, or Alice Munro’s Lives of Girls and Women…the narratives in West Girls shift between first and third person to converge upon femininity itself, vividly depicting the desire, insecurity and existential uncertainty of girls and women in Western Australia.”
THE GUARDIAN
“Woollett weaves a thicket of contrasting emotions, instincts and actions through her stories. Her characters are rarely nice, but vividly real and frequently poignant. And her sly commentary, sometimes open as a gift, sometimes urging the reader to work to put it together, is brilliant.”
INDAILY
“[S]mart, sordid and often quite visceral. If you’re looking for your next option after R.F. Kuang’s hotly acclaimed Yellowface, this could be a great companion read – many of the same themes are in the mixing pot, but with the welcome addition of a Real Housewives meets Wake in Fright undercurrent and a distinctly sapphic note.”
READINGS
“Sharp and clever, it leaves bite marks in the skin.”
ARTSHUB
“The deft execution of this sprawling, interlocked narrative is due in large part to the author’s willingness to surrender her control. The result is a witty, thought-provoking novel that serves as a reminder of life’s ultimate indifference towards us.”
AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW
“Darkly funny, this is a formally ambitious and original tale of interconnected female lives – part novel, part story collection. In unflinching prose as sharp as a teenage tongue, Woollett captures the parochial cruelty festering beneath Perth’s mining wealth and cloudless skies. Everyone is bruised, everyone is implicated. Moving from suburban malls to modelling catwalks, empty highways to crowded Instagram feeds, West Girls is as real as it is painful. Woollett has written a novel of sad girls that is the refreshing antithesis of the sad girl novel.”
STELLA PRIZE JUDGES