When 21-year-old Oli sets sail from Australia she embarks on a trip that will open her eyes to life's possibilities. Some years later, fluent in the language of the ocean, she is the only female crew member on-board a yacht delivery to New Zealand. There, in the darkness below deck, she learns something new: at sea, no one can hear you scream. Below Deck is about the moments that haunt us, that fan out like ripples through the deep. It is a novel about the vagaries of consent, about who has the space to speak and who is believed.
“#MeToo has clearly had a profound influence on this novel, and Hardcastle's delineation of the ambiguities and uncertainties that underpin consent is both cogent and moving” THE AUSTRALIAN
“vividly realised and richly detailed … Below Deck goes beyond colourful descriptions of people and places into the realm of total sensory experience for the characters and the reader” GOOD READING
“Below Deck is a stunning literary novel. This is a poetic work that can be read aloud just as easily as it can be read in silence” AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW
“Lyrical, profound, and deeply moving Sophie Hardcastle's Below Deck will confront as well as soothe, and is the most tender, hopeful battle-cry of a book” BROOKE DAVIS
“Hardcastle has captured the powerful words so many of us struggle to find, and I cannot imagine anyone could finish Below Deck unaffected. ” BRI LEE
“Below Deck will leave you breathless. Sophie Hardcastle is a phenomenal, courageous talent". ” CLEMENTINE FORD
“A novel that speaks implicitly but never didactically to the trauma of the #MeToo age … an astonishing achievement” SIR JONATHAN BATE
“The free-flowing intensity of the wind and waves that drives her characters' lives, also powers Sophie Hardcastle's memorable prose. Her writing sweeps us through hemispheres and across oceans with astonishing and immersive force. This is a deeply moving story of a young woman growing up, and Hardcastle is an extraordinary talent. ” ELLEKE BOEHMER
“How do we tell the story of ourselves when language fails us? With glorious colour, Sophie Hardcastle answers in her gutsy and vivid debut, Below Deck. Her synesthetic heroine, Olivia, experiences the world in pigments: a beloved friend is "velvet lilac", the number three is "uneasy green". Years after a fateful sailing voyage, the memory of a red encounter - deepest red - smoulders away. As timely as it is evocative, Below Deck's polychromatic depiction of trauma and its aftermath speaks to how women learn to inhabit their bodies and the world, and how those dark lessons can be triumphantly unlearned. ” BEEJAY SILCOX
“Tender, moving, frightening. This is an author unafraid to leave an absence for the unsaid; unafraid of silence. She never tells us too much but leaves space in our imagination for us to connect the dots and complete the story ourselves. ” CASS MORIARTY
