A stunning Australian love story for readers of Brokeback Mountain.

It’s the 1950s in conservative Australia, and Christopher, a young gay man, moves to ‘the City’ to escape the repressive atmosphere of his tiny hometown. Once there, however, he finds that it is just as censorial and punitive in its own way.

Then Christopher meets Morgan, and the two fall in love — a love that breathes truth back into Christopher’s stifled life. But the society around them remains rigid and unchanging, and what begins as a refuge for both men inevitably buckles under the intensity of navigating a world that wants them to refuse what they are. Will their devotion be enough to keep them together?

Marlo takes us into the landscape of a relationship defined as much by what is said and shared as by what has to remain unsaid.

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‘Affecting … While the novel portrays an era of criminalised desire, it doesn’t cede its emotional terrain to misery and shame, giving honest-to-goodness lust and love its due, too, without soft-soaping historical ills.’

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‘Carmichael’s second novel is a noble exercise in mapping lived but seemingly lost Australian queer histories. With its unfettered prose, Marlo is a quiet and earnest story of gay male desire and longing.’

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‘This novel, written with controlled retrospective fury and pain, is interleaved with archival black and white photographs of Melbourne, of known beats at the time and of particular parties. The photographs — grim, poignant, essentially dull — resonate. As does the novel. This was us? Indeed, it was.’

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‘Queer lives were dangerous, so hidden and coded. They are hard to retrieve. Jay Carmichael himself notes that his project is “a task of inference” … [Marlo's] style is spare, with use of actual photographs to create a mood both bleak and secretly joyous. It depicts past Melbourne as alien as a distant planet.’

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‘My only complaint is that Marlo left me wanting more.’

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‘Carmichael traces a hopeful story of two men trying to carve out some small corner of domestic peace that allows for joy. Even in its brevity, Marlo offers a glorious peek into historical gaps that were far from uninhabited.’

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‘[A] powerful, moving novella … Marlo reminds readers that the battle for equality is a continuum with a history.’

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‘Marlo affords a great opportunity to learn about past gay lives.’

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‘Through rich language, Carmichael portrays sparkling drag clubs and dark back alleys in a way that feels at once enchanting and perilous … The relationship between Christopher and Morgan illuminates conversations about gender and race: as an Aboriginal and a gay man, Morgan lives an even more dangerous life, and this intersectionality is engaging … Marlo is a character-driven novel about the harsh realities of being queer in Australia and what it meant to fight for love during a time when the world fought back.’