Book event

Chosen Family | Madeleine Grey in Conversation with Erin Hortle

A sexy, romantic, queer, epic literary novel for all readers by the award-winning author of the internationally acclaimed bestseller Green Dot.

Books about friendship are not often described as love stories, but this is one.

Nell Argall and Eve Bowman are both brilliant, odd and friendless. Traumatised in their first year of high school, their lives are changed forever when they meet.

Set in Sydney over eighteen years, Chosen Family follows Nell and Eve as they grow into themselves, as they both love and destroy each other. From school, to university, to careers, to motherhood, Nell’s and Eve’s is a relationship that is a life-raft that is also a poison apple that is also a Medusan stare, frozen in time.

Together, Nell and Eve are a double helix. Love, guilt, shame, joy – these emotions twist and turn between them. Can the wounds of adolescent betrayal ever really heal? Can we ever really understand what is going on in someone else’s head? And what’s love got to do, got to do with it?

Madeleine Gray is a writer and critic from Sydney. Her first novel, Green Dot, was an acclaimed bestseller in Australia and the UK. In 2024, Madeleine won the ABIA for Matt Richell New Writer of the Year Award and the 2025 Russell Prize for Humour Writing. 

Madeleine will be in conversation with Erin Hortle. Erin is a Tasmanian-based author whose fiction and essays explore new ways of imagining the human’s relationship with the more than human world, with a distinctly feminist bent. The Octopus and I, her debut novel was published Allen & Unwin in 2020 and was shortlisted for UTS Glenda Adams Award for New Writing and longlisted for the Voss Literary Prize and Tasmanian Book Prize. Her second novel, A Catalogue of Love, was published by Simon and Schuster in August, 2025.

Join Madeleine and Erin at the Afterword Cafe.