Sylvie, budding scholar and wild child, grows up in a stifling household, sleeping head-to-toe with her mentally unstable mother. As the family breaks apart, Sylvie tries to put it back together, to make sense of it. McCourt’s dialogue, which boldly animates the rural Australian characters, provides the child with clues. Sylvie, at the edge of family conversations and struggling to understand, asks for definitions of unfamiliar words (‘The Trollop’, ‘divorce’).

The meticulously structured narrative launches into a series of dramatic events, starting with the father’s small cruelties, which send shock waves through the neighbourhood. Within the escalating and gripping tension, McCourt maintains a light touch. The 1950s are brought into vivid and sometimes comic relief by cultural references: Archie, Superman and Phantom comics, Turf cigarettes, John Kennedy’s assassination, and thalidomide babies. By the beginning of the 1960s, Sylvie is fifteen and coming to terms with a world torn apart and a landscape threatened by oil explorations on her uncle’s land.

Always vivid and precise, it is in portraying nature that McCourt’s writing is at its most fluent. Originally from South Australia, she depicts the Coorong with the eye of a painter and a poet, evoking the firetails and finches, the boobialla and the marshy wetlands that provide a refuge, both comforting and dangerous, for the child. The author integrates the wilderness into the heart of this compelling story, a disappearance echoed in other losses and family tragedies.