What remains perhaps unlived – even unsought – nonetheless retains the power to determine what each woman will become. Words, phrases, and expressions occur in one limb before being reprised, déjà vu-fresh, in the story of the other. Implicit in this doubling is the idea that behind each self there might be a third or fourth iteration – another way of being in the world, or of living in a world that is more accommodating of their lives.

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Five years after Hardcastle’s novel is set – and 17,000 kilometres from Newcastle – Roland Barthes wrote, in A Lover’s Discourse, that over the course of 100 years literary madness has too often been understood as a form of depersonalisation. Rimbaud famously summarised the condition: “I am another.” Where love is concerned, Barthes suggested, coherence itself becomes a problem: “For me as an amorous subject [...] it is becoming a subject, being unable to keep myself from doing so, which drives me mad. I am not someone else: that is what I realise with horror.”

Lucy and Suzanne exist in a time when queer love and selfhood are prey to a kind of societal madness, the material and psychic entrapment of heteronormative refusal. Hardcastle explores this in terms of gender, sexuality and race, sometimes uneasily, as when an Australian with Vietnamese parents – Han – engages in a stagy bout of consciousness-raising with a white woman intent on confusing Vietnam with Thailand (when she isn’t posing the old “No, but where are you really from?” chestnut).

Han’s introduction in the narrative feels like typecasting: after educating Suzanne about the need for diversity in publishing, she more or less disappears, like an unusually obliging sensitivity reader, a white character’s guru.

In A Language of Limbs, the perpetrators of violence include families, street thugs, publishers – even the marginalised themselves. In one scene, Lucy hurts her partner, Caragh, in what reads like an instance of bisexual erasure. Lucy gets pulled up on it; but elsewhere, the novel suggests, in lieu of accountability, perpetrators are only innocents awaiting the proof of a guilt that will never be delivered: their victims are guilty already.

Towards the end of the novel, Lucy reflects on her childhood, before “my body swelled and became something like a shadow, outside and beyond, stalking the edge of me”. A shadow stalks each woman. Sometimes that shadow is their younger self; sometimes it is their unknown counterpart, a person who might have had the chance to live differently because of them.

Time moves unpredictably for each. They look for the names of things they do not yet have names for, the shape of a territory they do not yet know may exist. Even a shadow needs predecessors, outlines, to become visible.

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