Lucy Neave
Believe In Me
UQP, 2021
As a teenager in the 1970s, Sarah is forced to leave her home in upstate New York to accompany a missionary to Idaho. When she falls pregnant, she is dispatched to relatives in Sydney, who place her in a home for unmarried mothers. Years later her daughter, Bet, pieces together her mother’s life story, hoping to understand her better. As she learns more about Sarah’s past, Bet struggles to come to terms with her own history and identity, yet is determined to make peace with Sarah’s choices before it’s too late.
Lucy Neave’s moving and deeply personal second novel, Believe in Me, explores the relationships between mothers and their children across three generations of one family. The book questions what we can ever truly know of our parents’ early lives, even as their experiences weave ineffably into our identities and destinies.
Winner, 2023 ACT Book of the Year
Highly Commended, 2022 Christina Stead Prize for Fiction, NSW Premier's Literary Awards
“In a literary landscape where so much contemporary fiction is merely competent and corrigible – what Nabokov called ‘weak blond prose’ – Neave’s authoritative and idiosyncratic style is a refreshing surprise. The language is powerful and richly allusive ...”
About the Author
Lucy Neave grew up in Australia, Toronto, London and Kathmandu, and has spent several years living in the United States: first as a Fulbright scholar completing a Master of Fine Arts in writing, then teaching English in universities, and in 2019 as a visiting scholar in the English department at New York University. Lucy’s first novel, Who We Were, was shortlisted for the ACT Book of the Year. Her short fiction has been published in a range of Australian and American literary journals and in Best Australian Stories, and she was awarded a Griffith Review novella prize in 2018. She teaches creative writing at the Australian National University, where she is Associate Dean, Student Experience. She is the mother of two children.
