After five years together, Daniel leaves Leonard, the narrator, for all the usual mixed reasons – including a problem with drugs and failing faith (not love). Nobody wants to be the first to say goodbye, but Daniel finally volunteers: ‘Wheels spinning and spitting gravel in a way that reminded me of fun back home … Dan’s car twitched when it grabbed the bitumen, left a couple of Ss and was gone.’ Later, in a bitter echo, Lennie is also on the road: ‘by the time Daniel spun the wheels and the troll of loneliness came to squat, I didn’t care how much time I spent on the road. Anything was better than the flat.’ Lennie goes cruising, hopelessly, furtively, addictively.

Von Doussa deploys a striking device: single-page, single-paragraph chapters. These interruptions are vignettes of a character, or a scene, obscure at first, but becoming atmospheric. In an interview, Kate Grenville has stated: ‘in life, things don’t stop while somebody says something and then stuff starts up again, it’s all happening at once … what a writer, I think, is always trying to do is get the illusion of that simultaneity.’ Von Doussa’s intracollage makes a nice fist of it.

This brief first ‘novel’ (its novella-length is a virtue) is a story about loss and desire, and Lennie is not so sorry a fellow that we don’t feel for him. Von Doussa writes beautifully without being at all precious. It reads with the cold water clarity of the unillusioned, unhurriedly and well.