Grachu is a middle-aged migrant and struggling single mother who is late on rent and desperate for work after spending her last dollars on a plush couch. The setting moves between western Sydney and Uruguay, with multilingual streets and vibrant rhythms shaping daily life. Family relationships center on Grachu, her eldest daughter Rita, and her Aunt Chula, whose perspectives reveal Grachu's birth under Uruguay's 1973–1985 civic-military dictatorship. Themes include colonisation, state control, migration, poverty's exhausting calculations, and the political nature of survival. The account balances atrocity and hardship with joy, resistance, resilience, healing, and love.
Graciela Maria Ferreira or Grachu to her loved ones is late with the rent again, and she needs the money now. Unfortunately, she's spent her last dollars on a plush couch and her landlord is waiting on her doorstep. Grachu isn't always a believer but today she needs God to find her a new job. So begins Hailstones Fell Without Rain Natalia Figueroa Barroso's debut, and the second published novel by a Uruguayan-Australian writer.
The novel opens in Sydney's Fairfield, where families tug at their children in a musicality of languages: Vamos! Yalla! i nao!. It's a world alive with rhythm and colour, and the syncopation of the streets seems to shape the book's very form. With Grachu's life at its centre, the novel jumps between western Sydney and Uruguay, past and present, tracking the shifting relationships between Grachu, her oldest daughter, Rita, and her Aunt Chula, and the challenges and joys that have shaped their lives.
It grapples with the cruelty of oppression, the exhausting calculations that poverty requires and the necessity and cost of resilience and resistance. It is clear that survival is a political act and Figueroa Barroso's political and emotional insight shines through in the details. Yet, even as Hailstones explores these realities, it refuses to be consumed by them. Instead, it asks Isn't joy a form of resistance?
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