Do families aid creativity or do they stifle it? Does art require freedom and solitude, the luxuries of long, introspective walks on beaches and bottles of red for one, or can art arise from the chaos and banality of domestic life with a spouse and children?

Alice Haskins, the female lead of Melbourne playwright Joanna Murray-Smith’s third novel, is a forty-year-old writer who occupies a gorgeous 1950s weatherboard and stone pad in Sunnyside, the wealthy peninsula suburb that resembles Mornington Peninsula’s Mt Eliza. She has an attractive, attentive husband, English professor Harry, and two children, Joe and Grace. The family has lived for eighteen months in this lovely glass-walled house, floating in two acres of wisteria, elms, birches and liquidambars. They have moved to Sunnyside from the inner city, swapping cafés ‘exploding with young people and their piercings, their infantile politics, their arrogance’ for a more mature life: ‘the soundtrack of which would be the gentle plosh-plosh of the garden sprinkler, the bark of the golden retriever, the burble of the coffee percolator.’