The jacket blurb describes Beyond Redemption as ‘a novel about falling rapturously in love in the dark ages of the nineteen fifties.’

It’s before my time, but I had always thought of the 50s as the very opposite to dark: white sugar, white flour, clean lines on cars and furniture, the white lines in the sky from passing jets. An era of expansion – the baby boom, the great push for home ownership. In Australia, a time with a great concern for the marking out of territories and boundaries, definitions: the carefully fenced lawns planted with English shrubs marking out one’s private space, the nuclear family. And on a national level, the White Australia Policy.