Ruby Todd is a Melbourne-based writer with a PhD in writing and literature. She is the recipient of the 2019 Ploughshares Emerging Writer's Contest award for Fiction and the inaugural 2020 Furphy Literary Award, among others. Her work has appeared in Ploughshares, Crazyhorse, Overland and elsewhere. Shortlisted for the 2023 Victorian Premier's Unpublished Manuscript Award, Bright Objects is her debut novel.
'A literary mystery of consummate elegance and gravity. Bright Objects traces a graceful orbit around the phenomena of human grief and love.' Jessica Au, author of Cold Enough for Snow 'The X-Files meets Nick Cave's Ghosteen--science, faith, and human folly collide in this celestial melodrama.' Laura Elizabeth Woollett, author of The Newcomer and Beautiful Revolutionary 'Gripping, thrilling. An electric story of small towns, big secrets and the last great comet of the millennium.' Felicity McLean, author of The Van Apfel Girls are Gone 'A novel written with immense grace, beauty, and depth, Bright Objects plumbs the farthest reaches of one widow's grief, ultimately revealing the brilliance of our humanity in the face of immense loss--the will to fight for what's right, the will to hope, and most importantly, the will to love again. A surprising, thrilling, and seductively dangerous comet of a book.' Chelsea Bieker, author of Godshot and Madwoman 'Bright Objects is the story of a woman consumed by an unquellable obsession, reduced by solitude and incompleteness, caught in an unconscious embattled conspiracy of her own making. Ruby Todd writes of the strain of fearful events and discoveries, and the fatal inevitability of a sense of guilt when someone close to one is killed, all the while revealing to us the hidden realities that lie in wait for us.' Susanna Moore, author of In the Cut