Hazel spends much of the first half of the book lamenting her banal existence – her joblessness, her months without sex, her body, her status as a self-described ‘loser’. Her ennui is endearing, but at times her self-contempt shades into stereotype. Midalia’s dialogue is often effervescent, however, and it is the banter of voices, particularly the discursive exchanges between Hazel and her streetwise best friend, Beth, that are the great set-pieces of the book. A keen ear for urban dialect in all its ordinariness, shorn of lyricism, creates a warmth for the reader, like slipping into the familiar.

Midalia manages to deftly imbricate the political narrative of the Australian Greens party with the slow formation of Hazel’s romance with Adam, an older man and single father, whom she meets on a train, a copy of Jane Austen’s Persuasion the locus of mutual desire. Adam’s wariness and hurt are palpably limned, and he is a richly enigmatic figure. The Art of Persuasion is, however, essentially about female experience, about being a woman in this particular time – its quotidian character, certainly (the peculiar dissatisfaction of text messages, for example) – but also the horror of domestic violence and sexual predation, and the perils of motherhood.