Author(s): Alice Pung

Aust Fiction

From one of Australia's most celebrated authors comes a mother–daughter drama exploring the faultlines between love and control. One hundred days. It’s no time at all, she tells me. But she’s not the one waiting. In a heady whirlwind of independence, lust and defiance, sixteen-year-old Karuna falls pregnant. Not on purpose, but not entirely by accident, either. Incensed, Karuna’s mother, already over-protective, confines her to their fourteenth-storey housing-commission flat, to keep her safe from the outside world – and make sure she can’t get into any more trouble. Stuck inside for endless hours, Karuna battles her mother and herself for a sense of power in her own life, as a new life forms and grows within her. As the due date draws ever closer, the question of who will get to raise the baby – who it will call Mum – festers between them. One Hundred Days is a fractured fairytale exploring the fault lines between love and control. At times tense and claustrophobic, it is nevertheless brimming with humour, warmth and character. It is a magnificent new work from one of Australia’s most celebrated writers.  

Matilda Bookshop Review

This novel is carried along by the tenuous relationship between mother and daughter. Both formidable characters in their own rights, Karuna and Grand Mar battle in their stiflingly small apartment for power, agency and, perhaps ultimately, love. I was drawn to sympathise with Grand Mar, a woman straddling two cultures driven by an ultimate desire to protect the small world she has constructed in this foreign land. Karuna’s fierceness and obstinance reveal both the remarkability of teenage years, and the inherent vulnerability. I’ve thought about these women often since finishing reading. Kasey