It takes nerve to create three self-absorbed characters, set them in dingy inner-urban Sydney over one summer, give them booze, cigarettes and tattoos, and locate the drama in a share house without resorting to a He Died with a Falafel in His Hand fiasco of bad manners. But with this scenario Emily Maguire, in her surreptitiously brilliant third novel, has instead created a riveting emotional composition which plays out with the basso of a tragic opera, the discipline of a stage play and the authenticity of real life. The book sucks us into its melodramas and subtleties; we enter both a plausible and dynamic depiction of contemporary dysfunction, and a carefully crafted parable on the gifts and hazards of caring for one another.
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