The plot is pointedly simple. Frank, released from prison, is making his way from Sydney to an ill-defined spot somewhere in the Territory, close to Alice Springs. He carries little beyond a photograph and makes his way on foot, relying on the kindness of hitchhikers. As he slowly makes his way home, in encounter after encounter, the past returns in fragments, little of it comforting.

Throughout the novel, Mills tracks Frank’s every movement, his every ache. Consider the brief following paragraph: ‘He walks fast, in too much pain to run. He jogs in starts, stopping here and there to gasp his breath, until the house is out of sight. The sun is sinking across the highway and there’s a chill in the air.’ The immediacy and strength of such a passage is obvious – and the novel is full of such writing – but at length there is something almost bullying about it; too much of the body’s present concerns (sleep, food, shelter), and not enough of the wandering mind.

To say that the novel is comfortable with the possibility of boredom is not a backhanded reproach, but curious praise. Mills has the patience to stick with Frank throughout his travels, and through the broken stop-start rhythms of hitchhiking. At more than three hundred pages, the novel is perhaps longer than is necessary, but all the longueurs are at the service of a higher goal: fidelity to Frank’s experience. His journey is a long one, and Mills honours this; at no point does a long-haul truckie arrive to turn his thousand short lifts into a comfortable single trip.

The prose captures both the boredom of the road (‘They drive away in silence, Larry in a loop: hum, tap, fidget with the radio, hum, tap, fidget with the radio, for miles and miles’) and the casual mess of a less-than-perfect world. A community service breakfast table holds ‘instant coffee powder speckled with sugar, and sugar speckled with instant coffee powder’. These are finely observed details, and the novel is loaded with them. Mills has published a chapbook of poetry, and despite the occasional need to overwork a simple line (a bag, somewhat ridiculously, contains a ‘fatty deposit of socks’), the writing is vivid throughout.

The book is also successful is in its ability to empathise with Frank while never succumbing to political platitudes or conventional sentiment. There is an entire world of injustice and cruelty here (familial, institutional), but it is never overcooked or deterministic. Rather, it exists only in outline and suggestion. Prison has shaped Frank’s character almost wholly, yet our glimpses, when they arrive, are brief:

Inside you don’t ever sit still, you’re always in transition or rehabilitation, always moving through something. Processes, programs, parole meetings, grades. You put a foot wrong and they ship you. There’s no safe ground, no stopping, but every minute is gluey with boredom.

What Frank is short of is life – hence his endless mental observation and his rare moments of speech. He is also out of the loop with life since incarceration. He misses references to Wolf Creek, to Ivan Milat, to all of the social and cultural reference points people use to comprehend his slightly menacing transience. Mills’s research has also unearthed telling details. For instance, I was unaware spoons in prison had small holes drilled in them to prevent inmates using them for shooting up.

While the present-tense action pushes things along brutally and effectively, progress is increasingly halted by Frank’s flashbacks to his childhood. While the individual scenes are effective, the expectation of dramatic revelation and the standard drama of suppressed memory weigh the book down in the second half, as the flashbacks increase. The subtler hints that Mills deploys in the contemporary action offer all we might ever need to know about Frank’s helpless plight, and are more effective in their non-literal fashion. For instance, in an early scene in the novel, a row of cakes is described as ‘sliced breasts’, a horrid yet somehow utterly right piece of writing, both for its essential visual truth and its capturing of the dark mood trailing Frank on his odyssey. These edges of dark say more than longer scenes of literal horror ever could.

Still, these are minor complaints, and there is much elsewhere in the book to praise and enjoy. After a well-received first novel (The Diamond Anchor, 2009) and now Gone, Mills is clearly a talent with even stronger novels ahead of her.