Photos: Author Kate Mildenhall, the cover of The Hummingbird Effect, Kate and Karen in conversation at the Riverina Playhouse (photo by Campbell Cole), Kate signing books in the Riverina Playhouse foyer (photo by Campbell Cole).
The novel selected for One Book One Wagga 2024 was The Hummingbird Effect by Kate Mildenhall.
One of the lucky few with a job during the Depression, Peggy’s just starting out in life. She’s a bagging girl at the Angliss meatworks in Footscray, a place buzzing with life as well as death, where the gun slaughterman Jack has caught her eye – and she his.
How is her life connected to Hilda’s, almost a hundred years later, locked inside during a plague, or La’s, further on again, a singer working shifts in a warehouse as her eggs are frozen and her voice is used by AI bots? Let alone Maz, far removed in time, diving for remnants of a past that must be destroyed? Is it by the river that runs through their stories, eternal yet constantly changing – or by the mysterious Hummingbird Project, and the great question of whether the march of progress can ever be reversed?
'Kate Mildenhall is such an exciting writer to read … This generous, playful novel speaks to themes of climate change, survival and holding space for each other, as well as the enduring power of female friendship.' — The Guardian
'Spellbinding, genre-defying, and powerful in its vision of the future … The Hummingbird Effect is a devastating novel that exposes the ways the future is seeded in the past.' — Australian Book Review
Close to four hundred library members borrowed The Hummingbird Effect, and for the first time, the final event of One Book One Wagga took place as part of the inaugural Riverina Readers Festival.
Author Kate Mildenhall appeared in conversation with fellow author and podcaster Karen Viggers, onstage at the Riverina Playhouse, on Friday July 12th. Afterwards canapes were served in the foyer, where guests met Kate in person, and had their copies of The Hummingbird Effect signed.
The Hummingbird Effect was selected as one of the Sydney Morning Herald Best Reads of the Year for 2023, and went on to be shortlisted for the ABIA Literary Fiction Book of the Year 2024, as well as longlisted for the Stella Prize 2024 and the Indie Book Awards 2024.
