In her final years, Meggie Tulloch writes her life story as a gift to her granddaughter. From her childhood in rural Scotland at the start of the twentieth century to her youth in fisheries gutting herring and her emigration to a young Fremantle, Meggie fills exercise books and letters with stories for her Laura-lambsie.

In this act of life-writing, Amanda Curtin’s Elemental looks at memory and family history as narrative. ‘There’s no-one can tell a story true,’ Meggie Tulloch writes, worrying over what to include and what to omit. At times, when experiences are too hard to divulge, she drops into third person, using story as proxy. Much like Ian McEwan’s Atonement, Elemental draws Meggie’s act of writing as cathartic: an exorcism of demons from family history, paired with an understanding that truth can never be told in its entirety.

Although the novel is divided into parts as per the four elements, water is the strong point that holds Elemental together. In Meggie’s childhood Scotland, water is held in the wind with grit, salt bites at wounds, and stings are wrapped in bandages damp with vinegar. ‘The sea is a witch,’ Meggie’s Granda warns, ‘a witch an’ a mother.’ Throughout the book this depiction of the ocean as both antagonist and carer rings true. The sea provides refuge for Meggie, giving her work and, later, a new life in Australia, but it is also a space in which the darker parts of the Tullochs’ history takes place.

The strength of Elemental ultimately comes from Meggie. Curtin has managed to create a character rich with their own voice. On her love of reading, Meggie writes: ‘What precious things, no matter their flaky spines and oily smudges smelling of fish. What exhilaration to open a book and disappear!’ So too does Elemental provide this immersion, one that is a dense, lyrical rendering of a life.

James Butler is a freelance writer.