It is worth bearing such generic conventions in mind when reading The Art of Navigation. The first third – spanning one wild night in 1987 – reads like a long, psychedelic hallucination. Drifting at its centre is Nat, whose obsession with Edward Kelley – alchemist, charlatan, and assistant to Elizabeth I’s astrologist, Doctor John Dee – haunts and complicates all of the book’s timelines. In the second section, astral projections transport Kelley into the queen’s most private moments but also allow him to spy twentieth-century Australia through Nat’s eyes. Six hundred years later, Nat – now over a century old – uses the Skrype app her grandson developed to revisit a past she has been writing and rewriting since she was a girl.

‘But what does it mean?’ asks young Queen Bess, a sentiment anyone expecting a plot-driven work of speculative fiction might echo. ‘I want answers, not more auguries that lead like ropes of sand or sea slime to the moon!’ Yet The Art of Navigation offers few straight answers – and asks readers to supply their own compasses.