What’s remarkable about the novel is the way in which Down balances this darkness with small moments of beauty, rendering Maggie’s complex, harrowing life with grace, humanity and hope. One particularly memorable scene sees Maggie and her first husband observing the brilliance of bioluminescence at Phillip Island in the dead of night, lending a brief moment of awe and magic to their relationship, dying under the weight of grief.

Bodies of Light is a natural progression in Down’s writing, building on the best aspects of her previous works. She has always excelled at sketching portraits of people in their most difficult moments. Her 2016 first novel, Our Magic Hour, followed a tightknit group of twentysomethings grappling with a close friend’s suicide in Melbourne.

The following year, the author inhabited disparate lives in the short-story collection Pulse Points: a custody battle, a couple grappling with the grief of miscarriage, a sister going on a pilgrimage following her brother’s suicide to look for answers. These stories took the reader all around the world, from small-town Australia to Japan to the US; Down’s meticulous eye for detail and knowledge of place made each story feel like a vivid world in itself, tied together by her evocative turns of phrase.

Expanding this practice to a novel of this size and scope is a testament to Down’s evolving skill as a storyteller. She inhabits the voice of a man in his sixties writing an email in the late 2010s as convincingly as she does a child in foster care in the 1970s; small pop cultural details (songs, shopping chains, popular authors) are included to cement time.

It’s especially impressive how Down makes locations come alive with exacting details, from street intersections in tiny New Zealand towns to homely local meals in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Reading this book is an immersive experience of travel – a rare pleasure in our current conditions – as well as an intense emotional journey.

At the heart of this sprawling novel is the idea of reinvention – of not being defined by traumatic events but still acknowledging that they have happened, and finding ways to live with, and through, them. Of strength, survival and starting anew. A dignified documentation bearing witness to a life both quiet and immense, Bodies of Light is Down’s strongest work yet.