Reviews

Kate Lilley's long-awaited first book Versary is a most sophisticated and varied work with many turnings involved in its dynamic Janus-faced construction, looking both backwards and forwards in time, and brimming with imagination and many droll summaries of contemporary life—‘The shoes match the situation’—and in particular the constructs of gender and sexuality. Versary's complicated revolving symmetry begins with ‘Nicky's World’, partly inspired by The Young and the Restless, and ends with the appropriately disjointed ‘Sapphics’; that is, Versary moves backwards historically through artistic representations of love/sexuality and gender while the ‘story’ moves forward into self-realisation. Divided into five sections, the first and longest section ‘Lady in the Dark’ sets a racy tone: