The Bearcat (a large tree-dwelling mammal; 1920’s slang for a fiery girl or woman) by Georgia Rose Phillips.
1987. Family is everything to Anne, aka Our Messiah. And she demands everything from The Family: their loyalty, their money, even their children! In return, she promises existential comfort to lost and weary women. Anne knows how hard it is to build a family, and how easy it is to lose one.
1921. A child is born on a humid summer evening – Our Anne. Her mother, Florence, is trapped at home with a heedless husband and an unrelentingly demanding newborn. She is struggling to reconcile motherhood and her changeable sense of self.
For both mother and daughter, the past is for escaping, and love is impossible to trust. All they can hope for is that their family will save them.
The Bearcat is a complex and somewhat disturbing read, but also compelling and thought-provoking. An outstanding must-read from this talented writer. It was inspired by the true story of a notorious cult leader.
ISBN: 9781761266386
The Bearcat is available in paperback.
About Georgia Rose Phillips
Georgia Rose Phillips is an award-winning writer who publishes fiction, creative non-fiction, poetry, literary criticism and academic scholarship. Her creative non-fiction novella, Holocene, was runner-up in the 2018 Scribe Nonfiction Prize for Young Writers, and her short story ‘New Balance’ was a fiction winner in the 2021 Ultimo Prize. In 2022, her short story ‘Beyond the Marram Grass’ was a shortlisted finalist in the American Association of Australasian Literary Studies (AAALS) Prize. She is a Lecturer in Creative Writing at the University of Adelaide and holds a PhD in Creative Writing from the University of New South Wales.
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