Plunged into this world are sisters Tally and Grace, thirteen and fifteen, respectively, who escape to the city after their rural fugitive way of life comes to an end at the beginning of the novel. The sisters’ narratives are interwoven with the stories of a gritty crime journalist (or ‘information consultant’), Damon Spark, and Milk, an atmosphere tuner whose alchemic crowd-control techniques take him from manipulating gamblers in a dive casino on to bigger, more alarming briefs by the novel’s end. These strands orbit and intersect with the narratives of Tally and Grace, who are searching for one another in the Docklands.

Mundell’s Melbourne is a grimly fascinating one, not too gratuitously ugly, with plenty of location references to keep readers familiar with the city especially intrigued. It is a world divided by a blatant class strata, presumably the result of an unspecified financial crash and a vaguely referenced water crisis. Mundell’s underbelly may seem tame compared to some of her contemporaries (see Paolo Bacigalupi’s bloody-minded The Windup Girl), but there is a certain coming-of-age tenor to the novel that keeps it alive and, impressively for a début science fiction novel, believable.