In the UK, Scarlet discovers a piece of lost history: her great-grandfather, William, a Bundjalung man, fought in World War I. What follows is a compelling reconstruction from the “bare facts” of his life, an attempt to understand why someone would enlist to fight their invader’s war, frustration at the dismissal of this vital history, and the exclusion of Indigenous soldiers from national remembrance.

After befriending a fellow Aussie, David, “a biomedical engineer who specialises in implementing nanotechnology”, they embark upon a daring illegal border crossing amid global collapse; the novel, at its core, is an elaborate homecoming.

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The Great Undoing is ambitious in scope. These are but a few of its central concerns, which also include a romantic subplot with a British singer, the quotation of other Australian writers to create an intertextual bridge between fiction and the world, the non-chronological structure that reflects the urgent outpouring of Scarlet in a time of crisis, and the capsule histories of the world developing itself into ruin. It is ambitious, and at times sketchy as a result. The novel brims with ideas. Its short, few-page chapters phase between narrative depiction and didactic reflections.

But her ambitious storytelling is not something that undermines or detracts from the vitality of Allsop’s novel. This is a work of fiction that takes a risk, that gives us too much – that gives us, in other words, the illusion of containing everything in Scarlet’s world.