Madeleine Gray is a writer and critic from Sydney. She was a 2021 Finalist for the Walkley Pascall Prize for Arts Criticism, and has written for such publications as Overland, Meanjin, The Monthly, Sydney Review of Books, Australian Book Review, and the Times Literary Supplement. She also has a British connection, in that she has an MSt in English Literature from the University of Oxford and is a current doctoral candidate at the University of Manchester.

At 24, Hera is a violently unsatisfied disaster. To her, the future is nothing but an exhausting thought exercise, one depressing hypothetical after another. She's a mean little thing, adrift in her own smug malaise, until her new job as an "online community moderator" of a news outlet's online comment section-a job 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 relishes becoming a cliché as their mutual infatuation quickly festers into affair. She is coming apart with want and loving every second of it! Well, except for the tiny hiccup of Arthur's wife - and that said wife has no idea Hera exists. With her daringly specific and intimate voice, Gray has created an irresistible and messy love story about the terrible allure of wanting something that promises nothing; about the joys and indignities of coming into adulthood against the pitfalls of the 21st century; and the winding, torturous, and often very funny journey we take in deciding who we are and who we want to be.