AustLit

'Sofie Laguna was a successful writer of children’s and YA fiction before publishing her first novel for adults, One Foot Wrong, in 2008. Readers of that startling debut, or of her 2015 Miles Franklin Award winner The Eye of the Sheep, will find many familiar themes in her latest novel The Choke. Each is concerned with the struggle of a vulnerable child to define and to protect him- or herself in a grown-up world; each an astute, affecting exploration of the particular pressures that parental neglect and violence place on the children who observe and absorb it. Laguna’s subject matter is often confronting, the families she depicts beset by discord or economic hardship, her young protagonists forced to fend for themselves in harrowing circumstances. Yet while she takes her readers into what is very dark territory, exploring the effects of serious trauma and abuse, her novels are not bleak. The strength of her young narrators, their resilience and imagination, allows her to retain a crucial element of hope – even the promise of redemption – in the face of enormous suffering.' (Introduction)