The dull bus ride from Melbourne to Brisbane and then on to the tiny outback town of Ganymede where her Aunt Moira lives doesn’t seem to bode well for adventure. Nor does Ganymede itself, where the social life is structured around Catholic home masses, games of hoy and the gastronomic fear of anything as exotic as eggplant.

Aunt Moira introduces Vicky to the beautiful but scarily placid Judith, who is nineteen and lives at home in a room decorated like that of a little girl. Aunt Moira approves of Judith: ‘Sweetest nature you could ever imagine.’ Vicky finds Judith dim as a five-watt globe, but keeps her thoughts to herself. Judith goes out with the bland Den, whose brother Scott, is the town foodie.

When Vicky meets Scott, he is chopping basil. ‘Pesto,’ Judith whispered to me. ‘He’s a weird one!’ Vicky reflects, ‘It didn’t take much to overstep the boundaries of normality in Ganymede.’ Ganymede is the sort of place where nothing exciting ever happens – until Den and Judith disappear and their car is discovered just out of town, covered in blood.

On the road with the moody Scott, a bottle of sesame oil and an esky with the makings for strawberry crepes, in search of Den and Judith, Vicky finds all the adventure she could want for a lifetime.

Leonie Stevens is a great storyteller. This road-movie/girls’ own adventure/Eating Australia narrative rips along with the manic intensity of an outback gourmet hunting down a block of marinated goat’s cheese. Like Scott and Vicky, who discover a secret inland sea in the middle of the scorching desert, Stevens has a knack for finding wells of beauty and life within parched and arid lives. She has a vast empathy for people who live on the margins, for those rejected or just baffled by mainstream society.

In her fictional world it’s the weirdos and misfits who hold onto their humanity while popularity and beauty often mask truly damaged or depraved souls. There are few characters in contemporary fiction quite as creepy as sweet Judith.

If Eat Well and Stay Out of Jail is, in a sense, about what happens when you get the excitement you crave, Perfect Skin is about what happens when simple aspirations prove surprisingly difficult to achieve. The protagonist of Perfect Skin, Jon, who’d be familiar to fans of Earls’ 1998 novel Bachelor Kisses, expected that ‘everything would be sorted out long before I was thirty. And by thirty-four I’d be years into marriage, I’d have two children, all would be going well …’.

Instead, in his mid-thirties, his social life revolves around a couple of university friends, his parents, his six-month-old daughter Lily, a ‘coffee friend’, and a ‘running buddy’. The secret of Lily’s missing mother is the book’s central mystery. The solution to the mystery doesn’t need detective work, only that Jon come to terms with what’s happened. But like his baby daughter, Jon is in some ways still in the pre-verbal stage. He is forever naming objects to her (ducks, trees, buildings), and it’s almost like he’s working the world out for himself at the same time.

Jon wants to understand the rules of life: If you have dinner with a ‘coffee friend’, does that automatically signal romantic interest? At what point can a ‘running buddy’ be introduced to one’s friends? What do you do when you’ve soiled someone’s towels, not to mention their cat, in an embarrassing manner? Are there situations in which it’s excusable to leave the baby in the car – when you need to run into a burning building to rescue someone, for instance? Perhaps most crucially, what is the right way to deal with loss?

On late-night TV, Jon watches old romantic movies with ‘epic situations, swollen soundtracks, hardly a regular experience in there’. Falling asleep, he wakes to the sight of someone demonstrating a mop on a home shopping show. ‘The compere says, That’s truly remarkable, and,’ says Jon, ‘I miss those old movies, and all their more sincere lies.’ A metaphor for lost youth? I think so.

I want to ask Nick Earls: did a cat ever do to him what Flag did to Jon? Did he ever do to a cat what Jon did to Flag? Too funny. Too terrible. Too like something that could really happen. Just like the rest of Perfect Skin.