‘Sixteen, a sick bed.’ This lyrical refrain loops through Katherine Brabon’s fourth novel, Cure, capturing the cyclical, never-ending essence of living with chronic illness. You can be anything, anyone, anywhere, but it always comes back to these facts, this bed, this body.

In gentle, fragmentary prose, Cure follows a mother and daughter, Vera and Thea, who share the same unspecified illness. Both travel from Melbourne to Italy the year that they are sixteen to search for a cure, promised by way of a mysterious healer. The book moves back and forth in time, depicting Vera as a child and an adult, and Thea’s transformative year.