Gender and other forms of performativity are at the heart of this story. Growing up, Nina refuses to be domesticated. She sews the head of a lizard onto a cicada’s body – ‘mainly so the lizard could see what it would be like to fly’ – and recalls stories of men who would wear the skin of a cheetah in order to cannibalise each other. In a first rehearsal of masculinity, Nina cuts her hair, changes her skirts for trousers, adopts a new name, and labours at a brickworks, although for ‘only a ha’penny a day, or the real boys will get jealous’. In Sydney, Harry Crawford is surprisingly strong, walking with exaggerated steps ‘like a man twice [his] size’. His performance recalls that of Lady Reay, a fellow Long Bay prisoner, who ‘couldn’t tell the difference ... between acting and its opposite’. Perhaps because there was none.

Ultimately, Smith’s half-wild history unmasks the objective of narrative biography: the need to name, to identify, to domesticate by making singular its subject. Everything in this imaginative novel – its collage of archival and imagined material, its conflicting points of view, its collusion in the performance of identity – celebrates the multiplicity of its transgressive subject.