Green Dot

An irresistible and messy love story about the terrible allure of wanting something that promises nothingfrom debut author Madeleine Gray

At twenty-four, Hera is a clump of unmet potential. To her, the future is nothing but an exhausting thought exercise, one depressing hypothetical after another. She’s sharp in more ways than one, adrift in her own smug malaise, until her new job moderating the comments section of an online news outlet--a role even more mind-numbing than it sounds--introduces her to Arthur, a middle-aged journalist. Though she’s preferred women to men for years now, she soon finds herself falling into an all-consuming affair with him. She is coming apart with want and loving every second of it! Well, except for the tiny hiccup that Arthur has a wife--and that she has no idea Hera exists.

With its daringly specific and intimate voice, Green Dot is a darkly hilarious and deeply felt examination of the joys and indignities of coming into adulthood against the pitfalls of the twenty-first century and the winding, tortuous, and often very funny journey we take in deciding who we are and who we want to be.

Madeleine Gray is a writer and critic from Sydney. She has written for the Times Literary Supplement, the Guardian, the BBC, Electric Literature, Sydney Review of Books, and other publications. In 2019 she was a CA-SRB Emerging Critic, and in 2021 she was a finalist for the Pascall Prize for Arts Criticism, a finalist for the Woollahra Digital Literary Non-Fiction Award, and a recipient of a Neilma Sidney Literary Travel Fund grant. She has an MSt in English from the University of Oxford and is a current doctoral candidate at the University of Manchester. Green Dot is her first novel.