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Here, de Kretser joins other recent Australian novels in, like her narrator, “writing back” to Woolf. In Daisy and Woolf (2022), Michelle Cahill gave “a voice and a body” to Daisy, a marginalised Anglo-Indian character in Mrs Dalloway. And in This Devastating Fever (also 2022), Sophie Cunningham incorporated her process of writing a novel about Leonard Woolf into the novel itself, addressing an imaginary Virginia about, among other things, her racism and antisemitism. De Kretser masterfully juxtaposes this internal struggle with a sequence of phone calls from her narrator’s actual mother: a mirroring tangle of love and resistance, recognition and recoil: “Acknowledgement lay between denial and tearing down.”

The other key strand is a love triangle between the narrator, self-described “bohemian” mining engineering student Kit, and yellow-braided Olivia (who he’s in a “reconstructed relationship” with). The affair sparks after a screening of a film intimately documenting a woman’s year of pining over her ex-boyfriend, obsessing over the woman he left her for. “I didn’t know that this could be art,” the narrator (recovering from a similar situation) breathes, marvelling at “hearing [her] mind exposed”. She soon transfers her own obsession to Olivia, while aware it contradicts her feminism. She labels such contradictions, which also run throughout, “morbid symptoms”. In one of the most arresting images I can remember, they manifest as a bloodied tampon in a lasagne dish.

Though the narrator promised this novel would be messy – and it can be – that “mess” is always depicted with de Kretser’s characteristic precision. And the novel’s spare, fragmented structure elegantly incorporates its contradictory chorus of voices and ideas, which combine to suggest complex truths.

They are presented less as definitive answers than contributions to a deeper set of questions. How do we build our brains? What do we do when our heroes fail us? And what are the limits of storytelling and morality?