Bowe, now sixteen, is a perspicacious and assured novelist. She handles the challenges of dual narrative with skill, granting her teenaged characters a glib but credible turn of phrase, gilding the text with quirky lists and a support cast of odd-bod children and well-meaning, if mostly damaged, adults. Once we are through the somewhat clunky expository chapters – Jewel and Sacha have back-story big-time – Bowe’s story moves briskly along. This is a novel by Gen Y, for Gen Y. It celebrates friendship, remaining upbeat and optimistic, while tripping lightly over the surface of some major themes– death, dying, grief, loss – like a stone on a lake.

Many of the most successful turns in the novel are comic set pieces. A subplot involving the theft of garden gnomes is overcooked, but the liberation of a lobster from a tank in a restaurant is a highlight, and marks a turning point in the relationship of the central characters. Also engaging is the novelist’s take on modern families. Single parents or parental proxies are the norm, gay parents also get a look-in, and the portrait of Sacha’s best mate, boy genius Little Al, and his extended family – ‘obnoxious and dirt poor and so big you could get lost in it’ – is affectionate and refreshing.

Our next Sonya Hartnett? Too early to say. But Steph Bowe is a writer to watch.