It does not take much to see metaphor at work here. Jasmine, who represents the most recent of generations exploited by colonial settlerism, has talked Della into this tour because she feels it will help heal their fractured family. The concept of visiting white cultural sites as a way of reclaiming one’s Indigenous story seems extremely odd indeed, but it is this very incongruity that demands the reader persist to see how it all pans out.

It is ironic that Jasmine – a devoted reader, educated, open to the possibilities of what the wider world can teach her – at this moment in her journey feels only sadness, but it is also apt: she has carried sadness around her entire life. ‘I knew enough about loss to know that grief is a slow burn, an infinite void,’ she says. That comment, judiciously placed early on, also turns out to be a clue about how to read this novel. Many observations in this book are truisms that unfortunately still need articulating, even by people like Jasmine and Della who live daily the result of racial and intergenerational trauma.

Larissa Behrendt (photograph via ABC)

After Story commences well and truly after a story, a momentous one about family and cultural pain. Jasmine and her mother are reeling from the recent death of their father and husband, Jimmy, but the larger tragedy here is that although Jimmy and Della had lived apart for years, their bond was cemented via mutual suffering after the mysterious death of another child. Travel, especially to a place as far away as possible from Della’s small-town world, will give her and Jasmine a chance to talk, to reflect, to restore their emotional resources. At least that is Jasmine’s idea, when she chooses the backdrop of literary sites dear to her from her book-filled childhood. Like many who lose themselves in books, Jasmine is a loner and an outsider, both within her own family and town as well as later at university, and then work.

Della, by contrast, is not a reader; unused to self-reflection, she labours even to record brief notes of her trip. The flatness of her narrative voice is a risk, but the disturbing details of her own story, drip-fed through the novel, eventually account for this: Della has been flattened by life. Her personality seems so ingenuous as to be implausible, yet she reveals a homely wisdom that at times confounds her sophisticated and occasionally smug daughter.

Inevitably, events on this holiday do not unfold as planned, and the linear journey structure limits action in favour of reaction and reflection. The need for each narrator to explain themselves creates some clunky connective tissue (‘I thought about ...’, ‘I remembered ...’ are deployed rather too freely), however the slow-burn reveal of the story ultimately explains this muted narrative, just as Jasmine has hinted. Before we are halfway through, we are as conscious of Della’s fragility as her daughter is. Suffering from recent as well as distant grief, she seems on the verge of detonating either herself or the entire tour group. While Jasmine anxiously monitors Della’s sudden disappearances, odd outbursts, and covert drinking, we slowly become aware of the extent of her terrible loss and the real reason for her shame.

The significance of the literary tour becomes apparent with the implicit connection between these suppressed or untold stories, and those of famous writers, which contain their own shames, gaps, and silences: Virginia Woolf’s experience of sexual abuse, Lewis Carroll’s secrets, Shakespeare’s missing years. When Della and Jasmine properly communicate, the shadows start to recede. Despite the novel’s title and bleak content, ultimately it follows a chink of light through those shadows to present another story of healing. Maybe this cannot conquer trauma, lies, and misdeeds, but at least it gives them a decent hiding.

It is wrong to complain about the book the author has not written, but it is impossible to disregard another untold story that runs throughout: that of Aunty Elaine, family matriarch. Long dead, she was Jasmine’s childhood inspiration (and provider of books) and Della’s moral and cultural touchstone, a source of comfort when things were very troubled. Aunty Elaine’s courage, wisdom, humour, and resilience, invoked regularly by both narrators, are familiar qualities among Aboriginal Elders, but while she features strongly throughout this novel her presence remains shadowy, her own story elusive.

As After Story slowly unfolds, the stories before the old familiar ones – before Shakespeare, Austen, Woolf, et al. – develop their own authority. We are reminded, constantly, of the great weight of this history and culture, which is another reason why Aunty Elaine’s story is crying out to be told. The fundamental lessons After Story imparts might seem more suited to a generation ago, pre-Mabo, pre-Wik, pre-Bringing Them Home, but the fact that this country’s parliament repudiated that most generous of gifts from Aboriginal nations – the Uluru Statement from the Heart – shows that these lessons are still needed.