‘Cure lures you in with mesmeric prose then startles with profound insights on pain, faith, motherhood and, above all, love.’—Diana Reid, bestselling author of Love & Virtue and Signs of Damage.

‘Brabon’s elegant, poetic prose is transporting; she probes our human vulnerabilities with deep insight, empathy, and restraint. Cure is timely and entirely compelling.’—Sarah Holland-Batt, Stella Prize–winning author author of The Jaguar

About Cure

Her body hurts her all the time now. It is separate, a thing apart. In her mind it has become a person or an object that is not quite her, that she doesn't know. 

Vera and Thea are mother and daughter. Vera writes for the internet: she constructs identities and scenarios for brands to cater to the ideal consumer. Yet she also consumes the offerings of the online world herself: the addictive pursuit of a cure, the narratives she craves in which mother and daughter find a way out of the shared experience of chronic illness. She becomes preoccupied with a blog written by a woman named Claudia, a mother whose daughter also has a chronic illness.

While on holiday in Italy, Thea writes in her journal. She is also constructing a character: an image of herself as she grapples with having the same illness as her mother, Vera. But gradually another person emerges in her journal, through her imaginings of her mother in the same house, the same city, at the same age. They have come to Italy to see where Vera’s family originates, but also to chase a promised cure in the form of a man said to be able to heal Thea’s illness.

As they both grapple with their own narratives about their bodies and their wellness, all may not be as it seems. Perhaps a story does not necessarily need to be true for us to believe in it?

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Katherine Brabon is an award-winning writer from Naarm/ Melbourne. Her first novel, The Memory Artist, won The Australian/Vogel’s Literary Award in 2016. It was shortlisted in the NSW Premier’s Literary Awards and longlisted in the Indie Book Awards. Her second novel, The Shut Ins, won the People’s Choice Award at the New South Wales Premier’s Literary Awards in 2022. It was shortlisted for the Christina Stead Prize for Fiction, and longlisted for the Voss Prize and the ALS Gold Medal. Katherine’s third novel, Body Friend, was published in Australia and the UK by Ultimo Press, and in North America and Canada by Bloomsbury. It was shortlisted for the Stella Prize, the ALS Gold Medal and the University of Queensland Fiction Book Award.  

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Michelle de Kretser was born in Sri Lanka. She lives in Warrane/Sydney on unceded Gadigal land. An honorary associate of the English Department at the University of Sydney, she has won several awards for her fiction. Her latest novel is Theory & Practice, for which she was awarded the 2025 Stella Prize.