This is a raw and fearless book which explores the business of what it might mean to long for a child and to embark – both knowing and unknowing – on the harrowing medical and emotional rollercoaster of IVF. The narrator's voice – presumably Leigh's own – is compelling, distilled into short bursts of intensity which offer both the numbing details of statistics and procedure interspersed with a painful, self-critiquing interiority. The desire for a child arises in the context of her marriage, where the child is envisaged as an externalisation of mutuality. However, as the marriage fails, overtaken by the increasingly compulsive desire to conceive, the narrator takes on the idea of the child as a purely personal goal – the child as an incarnate miracle of dream and sweetness who will both 'save' and justify the speaker's life. The book's description of her final extrication from the gamble of IVF, the standing aside from the giddying highs of hopefulness and the depths of disappointment, is touching in its tenuousness: that the avalanche of love one has for the imagined child need not smother the self, but might be shared more widely, 'I to You; I to We; I to This.'

Leigh's novels The Hunter (1999) and Disquiet (2008), as well as her film Sleeping Beauty (2011), also plumb intense emotional worlds. Avalanche's world is explicitly personal, but it is also an offering of insight and honesty, hauntingly written.