A Catalogue of Love

by Erin Hortle

A young woman surfer’s coming of age in Tasmania, where the natural world helps her find herself and navigate grief and trauma. Echoes of Love and Virtue, Breath and H is for Hawk.
 
‘Did I still love him? No, probably not. Just the memory of him. Except it wasn’t even that. It was probably that I was in love with the memory of the me who’d loved him before.’

Neika learned to surf in the sometimes crystal-clear, sometimes opaque green barrels of Cloudy Bay, under the guidance of her father and stepfather. Bruny Island, surfing and the natural world are as much a part of her as her blood and breath.

In her twenties now, she has made her way in the world without her mother, who died when Neika was only two. Her path to adulthood was shaped by the love of two adoring fathers, but sitting alongside their love was always a mother-shaped hole. How different would she be if she’d had her mother there to guide her? Would she have dodged the mistakes that seem to define her life?

Neika watches the world around her like the scientist she has become, seeking to understand what it means to be a woman in a culture that does not always treat women kindly. In navigating her catalogue of experiences – desire, loss, love and power – she comes to see how each has made her who she is.    

A moving and thrilling novel from the acclaimed author of The Octopus and I.

Genres: Fiction

293 pages, Kindle Edition

Published August 26, 2025

About the author

Erin Hortle is a Tasmanian-based writer. Her short fiction and essays have been published in a range of Tasmanian and Australian publications. The majority of her academic and creative writing explores the ways in which experimental approaches to writing might facilitate new ways of imagining the human's relationship with the more than human world, with a distinctly feminist bent. Topics she writes about currently include ambergris, surfing and surf culture, pelagic birds and octopuses. When she's not writing, she can usually be found curled up with a book, or floating and drifting in the Tasman Sea or Southern Ocean. The Octopus and I is her debut novel.

Reviews

[what.karli.reads · Rating 3 out of 5]

⭐️⭐️⭐️💫 3.75/5

𝙰 𝚋𝚎𝚊𝚞𝚝𝚒𝚏𝚞𝚕𝚕𝚢 𝚍𝚎𝚜𝚌𝚛𝚒𝚙𝚝𝚒𝚟𝚎 𝚘𝚍𝚎 𝚝𝚘 𝚃𝚊𝚜𝚖𝚊𝚗𝚒𝚊 𝙴𝚛𝚒𝚗'𝚜 𝚒𝚖𝚖𝚎𝚛𝚜𝚒𝚟𝚎 𝚠𝚛𝚒𝚝𝚒𝚗𝚐 𝚙𝚞𝚕𝚕𝚜 𝚢𝚘𝚞 𝚒𝚗𝚝𝚘 𝚝𝚑𝚎 𝚙𝚊𝚐𝚎𝚜 𝚊𝚗𝚍 𝚝𝚊𝚔𝚎𝚜 𝚢𝚘𝚞 𝚊 𝚕𝚘𝚗𝚐 𝚏𝚘𝚛 𝚝𝚑𝚎 𝚕𝚒𝚝𝚎𝚛𝚊𝚛𝚢 𝚓𝚘𝚞𝚛𝚗𝚎𝚢 𝚘𝚏 𝚍𝚒𝚏𝚏𝚎𝚛𝚎𝚗𝚝 𝚝𝚢𝚙𝚎𝚜 𝚘𝚏 𝙻𝙾𝚅𝙴 - 𝚜𝚎𝚕𝚏 𝚕𝚘𝚟𝚎, 𝚏𝚊𝚖𝚒𝚕𝚢, 𝚏𝚛𝚒𝚎𝚗𝚍𝚜, 𝚜𝚞𝚛𝚏𝚒𝚗𝚐, 𝚝𝚑𝚎 𝚘𝚌𝚎𝚊𝚗 𝚊𝚗𝚍 𝚖𝚊𝚝𝚝𝚎𝚛𝚜 𝚘𝚏 𝚝𝚑𝚎 𝚑𝚎𝚊𝚛𝚝.

𝙰 𝚋𝚘𝚘𝚔 𝚝𝚑𝚊𝚝'𝚜 𝚖𝚘𝚜𝚝 𝚍𝚎𝚏𝚒𝚗𝚒𝚝𝚎𝚕𝚢 𝚠𝚘𝚛𝚝𝚑 𝚛𝚎𝚊𝚍𝚒𝚗𝚐!

(𝐏𝐋𝐄𝐀𝐒𝐄 𝐍𝐎𝐓𝐄: 𝐈 𝐰𝐡𝐨𝐥𝐞𝐡𝐞𝐚𝐫𝐭𝐞𝐝𝐥𝐲 𝐛𝐞𝐥𝐢𝐞𝐯𝐞 𝐫𝐞𝐚𝐝𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐢𝐬 𝐯𝐞𝐫𝐲 𝐦𝐮𝐜𝐡 ’𝐬𝐮𝐛𝐣𝐞𝐜𝐭𝐢𝐯𝐞’ 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐦𝐲 𝐫𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐢𝐬 𝐀𝐋𝐖𝐀𝐘𝐒 𝐛𝐚𝐬𝐞𝐝 𝐨𝐧 𝐡𝐨𝐰 𝐈 𝐩𝐞𝐫𝐬𝐨𝐧𝐚𝐥𝐥𝐲 𝐞𝐧𝐣𝐨𝐲𝐞𝐝 𝐢𝐭)

[Chloe Power · Rating 5 out of 5]

Utterly brilliant! Oozing with nostalgia and imagery of the Tassie land and seascapes, it transported me straight back to the heart shaped isle. I could almost smell the iconic scent of the coastal cold climate in its pages: surfboard wax mixed with beach-fire smoke and wet eucalypt leaves. This is a book about love, yes, but above all, the admiration and proudness of place is so tender and evident in Hortles words. The strikingly familiar characters and places made me reminisce on my own experiences shaped by the quirks born from the islands’ isolation. Profound, poignant, angsty and sentimental, Erin Hortle is a talented Tasmanian writer who has done it again with this raw and organic coming-of-age novel, akin to the likes of Breath by Tim Winton with a feminine flair belonging to a young woman’s diary of growing up in Australia in the 2000s. 👏🏽 🌊 🌬️

[Sarah · Rating 4 out of 5]

A girl who loves the ocean, surfing, shearwaters and has multiple men chasing after her. What’s not to like?

[Rachel · Rating 4 out of 5]

With thanks to Simon & Schuster AU and NetGalley for the eARC

This is most certainly a book full of love.

The love of surfing. The power of a wave. The power of a body with a wave. The love of and for the ocean and its unyielding power to both break and heal.

The love between a step-father and step-daughter. The relationship between Neika and Sean truly grounds this book. One of the most beautiful I’ve read recently.

The love of knowledge. Of exploring and expanding one’s mind. Of reflection and understanding. Of questioning.

The evolution toward self-love amongst grief and trauma.

But the most potent example of love, is the one for Tasmania and Bruny that just leaps from the pages. The effervescent language that depicts the land and the environment is enchanting and fresh. Windswept and gracious. Full of gratitude and awe.

A truly luscious and cosy read (full of all the important things) for August that I absolutely adored.

[Bianca · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 stars 🌟

i wanted to love this because it felt like sitting down with a friend and hearing them share their life story with you, but something about it just didn't quite reach that point for me. it dealt with some tough subject matter, like grief, love, figuring out how you fit into the world. i think parts of it felt a bit too philosophical for me to resonate with the main character, and it felt simultaneously not quite fleshed out, but also too existential in parts. overall though, a thoughtful book touching on many important themes in a woman's life

[Lucy Jansson · Rating 3 out of 5]

Only picked this up because I saw it was set on Bruny Island, where I was lucky enough to spend a lot of my childhood. So glad I did! Beautiful writing and storytelling.

[Morgan]

dnf
Being a local I desperately wanted to love this book but it just didn't grab me like octopus and I did.

[Gavan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Just amazing. Pretty much what it says on the pack - this book is a catalogue of love in many forms. Family, friends, colleagues, school mates, the environment, birds, threatened animals. Wonderful evocative descriptions of Bruny Island and southern Tasmania. Wonderful descriptions of surfing for those of us that have never surfed. And a strong dynamic plot that drives forward the development of Neika, our narrator. Simply brilliant writing.

[nina.reads.books · Rating 4 out of 5]

I absolutely adored Erin Hortle’s debut novel The Octopus and I, which definitely didn’t get enough buzz being released in 2020 amid pandemic panic. This book was such a unique reading experience and the author’s love of nature and animals and Tasmania was very apparent. It was one of my favourites in 2020.

I was therefore very excited to read her second novel A Catalogue of Love. But this one didn’t land quite so beautifully. I did really enjoy reading it but since I read it nearly 2 months ago it just hasn’t stayed with me.

Neika is a young woman living on Bruny Island. She is a surfer and a scientist. Her mother died when she was two and she grew up with her father and later also a stepfather. Two dads but no mum. This experience shapes how she experiences growing up as a woman and also how she responds to trauma.

This book was another love letter to Tasmania and you can tell just how much Erin Hortle adores her home and the natural world more broadly. So the setting was wonderfully conveyed. But I didn’t fully connect with Neika’s experiences and never quite worked out what the story was trying to achieve. Neika has an experience while a teenager which ripples through her early adulthood. A close male friend at the time reappears in her life bringing back memories and lots of meandering thoughts and musings. While I enjoyed reading it, I didn’t feel completely satisfied at the end.

Still a good read and another Tasmania author to watch – we have so many amazing authors who live in and write about Tasmania. It definitely makes me want to go and spend time down there!

[Jan Mawdesley · Rating 5 out of 5]

Reviewed by Trish Palmer for S&S AU and Bluewolf Reviews.
Erin H0rtle’s story is about a young girl’s journey from childhood to adulthood. A Catalogue of Love is rich with experiences and enhanced with marvellous descriptive writing. We are taken on Neika’s journey through her early days and are privy to her most intimate thoughts and opinions.
Neika, her brother Heath, mother and father are a tight knit happy family. They live an idyllic life on Bruny Island. But the young mother dies and although father is bereft, he maintains the warmth and love in the family. They live to surf and immerse themselves in the ocean.
Their neighbour Sean, a farmer nearby, comes to help and when Neika sees him in bed with her father, she realises that dad loves women and men. The story evolves around the love and steadfast support of her two fathers who nurture her in every way.
As she grows the girl wonders how different life would have been with a mother, but there are only a few occasions when she feels this way. The author explores the advice that was given to the girl at school when a kid teased her about her gay father. “Oh yes he is, she said, but your father is often drunk, isn’t he?”
There is such a comfortable acceptance that the family persuade Sean to enter his lamingtons in the show, competing with the CWA ladies. As Neika becomes a teenager, she longs for a relationship and makes mistakes in decisions.
As an adult, Neika returns to Bruny Island to work as a PHD student. She reflects on many issues and shares thoughts with her best friend Meg. In these conversations, the young woman explores the ideas of love, and how her life is like a card catalogue. The outside, her body, but inside, many cards shuffled around to indicate her thoughts, experiences and desires.
The greatest strength of this engrossing read is the description of the sea, and how Neika a female surfer, examines the movement of water and how her passion is to master each wave.

[Claire Craig · Rating 4 out of 5]

Incredibly poignant and moving in a realistic and nuanced way. I loved the feminist approach to the protagonist’s narrative. The scrutiny of her experience with two fathers and the unravelling of how it shaped her understanding of the space she occupied was especially noteworthy. Erin Hortle put a microscope to natural ecosystems that are complex and interconnected, drawing parallels to the human experience where relationships are often shaded in variations of light and darkness. I especially liked Erin Hortle’s sociological observations which manifested themselves in the protagonist’s stream of consciousness. What came of it was a subtle commentary on privilege and perspective, serving to show that our values and experiences shape our patterns of behaviour. While the ending was unsatisfactory in a way, I think it had a role to play in the narrative, going back to Erin Hortle’s pragmatic view and authentic approach to the narrative. Alongside the moments of truthfulness was a real sense of appreciation for naturalism. The imagery of the ocean and the Tasmanian landscape was so beautiful and made for an overall pleasurable read. All in all a great book!!!!!

>>> as an aside I think Bruny island represented a place of security and love. The protagonist’s journey away from the island before her eventual return mirrors our experience as we navigate the world trying to solidify our values and find a place where those values co-exist. This book was a great reminder that life is messy and imperfect! The nuance of the human experience that was examined in this book was a welcomed perspective and I appreciated the acceptance of contradiction, context and complexity. It was a great reminder in a world full of binaries where certainty swamps experience and curiosity.

Thanks Erin!

[Kristin · Rating 4 out of 5]

This novel was such a beautiful and quintessentially Australian read. A girl grows up on the wild and rugged coast of Bruny island, surfing the waves like one of the guys, at home amidst the teeming wildlife. Raised by two fathers, love and acceptance are just her normal, despite being surrounded by a dose of small-town thinking. For a short while the girl is just a kid, isolated and thus insulated in a bubble in which her immediate family are all male, and thus she seems somewhat impervious to the expectations that the world has of women. Yet still, comments about her body slowly leave their imprint on her, and she becomes increasingly aware of what it means to be female. She is a strong surfer, a girl holding her own in a male dominated field. Going on to become a scientist studying seabirds, in the niche of psychobiology, she also starts to comprehend what it is to be career-ambitious in a male-centric world. But buried deep is also unspoken trauma from the all too common female experience of assault at the hands of a man, and the confusion and sometimes ambiguity of identifying that experience for what it is. There is also a gentle undercurrent of climate crisis, as our character acknowledges her wish to study seabirds simply because she loves them, and she would like her love for them to be measured through action towards conservation while they still exist, rather than through the grief of loss once they are gone. Even though this book itself is fiction, in it the character begins writing about her life, and as such it is also an interesting reflection upon the act of memoir writing, and the cataloguing of experiences that comprise our lifetimes.

[Sophie Wood · Rating 3 out of 5]

Hortle’s debut novel, ‘The Octopus and I’ is one of my favourite works of fiction set in Lutruwita/Tasmania, and as a fellow Tasmanian and English major graduate from UTAS, I really wanted to love this book too.

However, my first mistake was choosing to listen to the audiobook version, and my GOD did the narrator butcher all the Tasmanian place names! From what I understood, she even got the main character’s name wrong - written Neika (as Tasmanians know, pronounced “N-ee-kah”) but she pronounced it “N-eye-Kah”. The novel also included references to feminist writers and philosophers, whose names the narrator also pronounced incorrectly. This icked me SO much that I found it hard to really sink my teeth into the story.

But! Regardless of my ick, I still thought A Catalogue of Love was beautifully written. I lapped up the imagery of home - in some parts I was moved to tears, laughed aloud, and felt the whip of Bruny’s icy wind against my skin… it was so visceral.

I can see what Hortle was trying to do - pairing ocker Aussie small-town surf culture with feminist phenomenological musings on womanhood and our connection to nature (plus lots of research about shearwaters) in an unlikely union of sorts. But it didn’t quite hit the mark for me - it felt a little clunky; like it never fully evolved into the story it could’ve been. Also the similarities to her first novel were like… girl come onnnnnn now!!!

It’s giving: Tim Winton’s ‘Breath’, but set in Tasmania and more feminist.

[Laura Bell · Rating 3 out of 5]

I was eager for Hortle’s second novel after devouring her first ‘The Octopus and I’. The first few chapters didn’t disappoint with dramatic descriptions of Tasmanian scenery - re exciting me about my home state after a winter/spring that dragged and the uniqueness of living here- , writing making me feel warm and comfortable and a relatable protagonist. However, I found myself becoming bored with the long metaphors and descriptions of bird life/philosophical thoughts that would meander on for what felt like an eternity for the protagonist to figure out… well nothing. But maybe that was the point and maybe that was an accurate description of thought processes. For me though, some of these passages were just too long, my thoughts wandering until suddenly I was at the end of a page thinking ‘have I just read this page?’. In saying that, it picked up again for me toward the end of the story and when finishing it, I pondered and reflected on the narrative for a while and I realised I did in fact quite enjoy it. A relatively easy read which provoked thoughts for me about growing up in Tas/Aus as a female and how this will be similar/different for my two daughters.

Enjoyed: descriptions of Tassie scenery, father-father-daughter relationship, challenges females face on the daily,

Disliked: long thoughts from protagonist

3.5/5

[Maddi Schmidt · Rating 5 out of 5]

A Catalogue of Love is a stunning and deeply moving exploration of the many forms love takes, tender, messy, fierce and transformative. Erin Hortle writes with such lyrical precision that every sentence feels carefully crafted yet never overwrought.

What stood out most for me was the setting. Hortle captures place with such vivid detail that you can almost smell the salt in the air and feel the landscape pressing against the lives of her characters. The natural world isn’t just a backdrop but a living, breathing presence that shapes the story in powerful and unforgettable ways.

The characters feel alive, flawed and utterly real, and the way Hortle weaves their relationships with the world around them makes the book feel at once universal and deeply grounded in place. It’s the kind of novel that lingers long after you’ve finished, leaving you reflecting on how love and environment are inseparable.

A beautiful, atmospheric and unforgettable read.
***Thank you Netgalley for and ARC****

[Christine · Rating 4 out of 5]

Beautifully written and easy reading. Set in Tasmania the book explores life for a young girl growing up without a mother in her life, dealing with life’s experiences and learning to be content with herself.

[Chloe Ŀicious · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.75 ⭐️

A meandering sort of coming of age story. It flows between ages from childhood to late 20s, back and forth a bit. I enjoyed the fleshing out of Neika’s character, and especially her relationship with Sean (a step father of sorts).

[Sallie Clark · Rating 5 out of 5]

I just loved this book. Set on Bruny Island a place I have always had a connection to. A book I couldn’t wait to get back to each day. I felt so steeped in the story. Neika felt real, a well rounded character. Beautiful writing, an engaging story, who could ask for more?

[Corinne Johnston · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a DNF at the halfway point. I'm sure there is much to admire but the incessant description of surfing, of waves, of faces of waves, was just too much for me. I live in a surfing community, even though never surfed myself. Just way too much surf, not enough of the human characters.

[Lisa · Rating 5 out of 5]

What a way to start 2026. This book was everything I wanted and needed right now. Sun, salt, grief, tears, hope, and love. I read, and liked, The Octopus and I, but A Catalogue of Love really hit me in all the right feels.

[Melissa · Rating 5 out of 5]

Absolutely loved it!

[Kristy (sometimes_i_read_books) · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5⭐️

[Lauren · Rating 5 out of 5]

I loved this book! Loved the tassie references, the surfing, relatable story lines.

[thekook · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5

[Allyt_hobart · Rating 3 out of 5]

This felt cobbled together and lacked clarity and direction in the telling

Beautifully evocative of Bruny and the power and lure of the ocean. Loved the father:daughter relationships

[Kate · Rating 4 out of 5]

Beautifully written. Captures Tasmania perfectly. Loved it.

[Thea · Rating 3 out of 5]

2.95

[Liv · Rating 5 out of 5]

Erin Hortle is fast becoming one of my favourite Australian authors. Absolutely incredible. The characters, themes and imagery are everything.

[Pollyanna Darling · Rating 4 out of 5]

Hugely enjoyable, evocative, thought provoking and richly layered read.

[Claire Louisa · Rating 4 out of 5]

Thoughts to come.