Thus characters often elide history and its implications. In ‘Here We Lie’, the reader bears witness to a townswoman’s suicide and the ugly gash of a secret it exposes. An unnamed narrator insists on employing ‘we’, never ‘I’. To employ the latter would be to admit personal culpability; an impossibility for one who claims, ‘We’re good men.’ Largely, people appear in convincing states of fallibility, grappling with their families and their own tenuous positions within them. Clarkson exposes the particularity of characters through penetrating prose, and is adroit at capturing escalating tensions.

‘Novels in stories’ create a quandary for readers and critics. The form operates at its finest in Elizabeth Strout’s exquisite Olive Kitteridge. The stories work individually, but in their entirety they produce a memorably textured study of a singular woman and the town in which she lives. Clarkson might very well have been inspired by Olive Kitteridge (2008), but Barking Dogs sits within a more modern, distinctively Australian terrain and vernacular. Being non-linear with multiple changes of perspective and narrator, it is best read as a collection of interconnected stories (one was shortlisted for the 2013 ABR Elizabeth Jolley Short Story Prize). As such, the book depicts a highly arresting see-saw of human frailty and doggedness.