The Bearcat (Georgia Rose Phillips, Picador)

Based on true events, The Bearcat is an ambitious, mesmeric and deeply affecting debut novel that imagines the inner life of Anne Hamilton-Byrne, a rare female cult leader who founded ‘The Family’ in 1960s Victoria, proclaiming herself Jesus reincarnated. While we get glimpses into the lives of cult members and the abuse that went on, The Bearcat focuses on the years that predate The Family. Through dual perspectives, we witness the first year of Anne’s life through the eyes of her mother, Florence, as well as Anne’s perspective from early adolescence into adulthood. Phillips’ prose style is confident and evocative; it has a lilting, immersive rhythm and bursts with dazzling imagery. The exquisite portrayal of Florence in 1922 is undoubtedly the novel’s strength. Phillips’ intimate depiction of her crushing loneliness, struggles with motherhood, suppressed romantic interest in a female neighbour, and increasing dissociation from reality is thoroughly absorbing and haunting. Anne’s perspective, while also compelling, feels less cohesive. Although Phillips writes empathetically and credibly of Anne’s multiple reinventions of self that belie a fractured identity and emptiness, it is sometimes hard to connect this neglected, grief-stricken victim of unhappy circumstances with the cruel, narcissistic cult leader she becomes. The Bearcat, for fans of Miles Allinson’s In Moonland and Laura Elizabeth Woollett’s Beautiful Revolutionary, is a memorable literary debut that paints a complex psychological portrait of two generations of women trapped in oppressive domestic situations.

Books+Publishing reviewer: Charlotte Callander is a freelance writer who has worked as a bookseller and museum educator. Books+Publishing is Australia’s number-one source of pre-publication book reviews.

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