Lonely Mouth

'Lonely mouth ... It's a Japanese expression. You feel like you want to eat something but you don't know what it is. You're looking for just the right thing. But maybe there is no right thing. Maybe you don't need anything at all. You want to put something in your mouth but you're not exactly hungry. Or maybe, like, a constant hunger that will never be sated.'

Matilda and Lara are half-sisters who share an unreliable mother and a chaotic past. In every other way, though, they are very different from each other. Lara, ten years younger than Matilda, is a model, living and working in Paris - for her, life is expansive, carefree, beautiful, careless. Matilda's life, in contrast, is solitary, contained, ordered. She works in one of Sydney's buzziest restaurants, Bocca, with an unrequited crush on her boss, celebrity chef Colson. If she's careful - and she always is - she can keep everything in its proper place. Hold the balance between hunger and satiation.

But when Lara's father, the long-absent, erratic Angus Del Ray, comes back into the sisters' lives, determined to apologise for his past misdeeds, Matilda's compartmentalised life goes seriously awry. As everything blows apart, Matilda is forced to come to a reckoning with who she is, and how to satisfy the hunger she wants to deny.