Miles Franklin-shortlisted author’s new novel follows a ghost who can inhabit different bodies in a reflective take on the genre
It’s hardly a spoiler to reveal that the chief protagonist of Jennifer Mills’s latest novel dies. It is fleeting, fragmented, violent, and over by page four – but it is not the end. “Evicted” from their own body, microbiology student Yun’s consciousness soon coalesces, unsteadily at first, into that of another person. And then another, and another, and another.
“It jumped into my body,” Mills says of the premise of The Airways, which first struck her during a residency in Beijing a decade ago. “I was on the subway one day, I must have just been daydreaming as I usually do, and this thought of a ghost that could jump between bodies almost jumped into me.”