This book is being touted as THE Australian novel of the year. Debra Adelaide has been on the local literary scene for decades, and has ten books behind her, but she netted a $1 million advance for this one. Coming to the book in the shadow of all this hype, I was – I’ll admit – prepared to hate it. But I was quickly hooked by this deceptively low-key novel and the predicament of its non-nonsense (but deliciously witty) protagonist, an advice columnist and bestselling author of a series of household guides to laundry, cooking, and other lost domestic ‘arts’.

Delia is dying of breast cancer. She has had her final – useless – chemotherapy treatment and is waiting to die. As she ties up loose ends and reflects on her life so far, she finds herself haunted by her stay in a small northern NSW town, Amethyst, where she arrived as a pregnant single mother-to-be, and the tragic events that took place there, decades ago. She detours from her domestic kingdom, where she writes her advice column, makes school lunches, whips up nourishing meals and cuddles her chickens, in an attempt to tie up the loosest end of all. And of course, in the midst of it all, she has decided to face death the most practical way she knows how: writing a book about it, her final one: A Household Guide to Dying.

Delia is a delightfully eccentric character, balancing her innate quirkiness with an almost matronly practicality and a frightening mastery of the household ‘arts’. It’s this unlikely balance that is most endearing about her. She secretly makes blood sausages with her own blood and pops them in the freezer for her unsuspecting family to eat when she’s gone. (‘I put myself into this dish.’) She poses with a martini glass in her own coffin for her book cover. She tells her grieving husband that she’d quite like him to marry his bookkeeper after she’s gone. And she hopes that her publisher can organise for dumpbins of her book to be available at her funeral.

The Household Guide to Dying is very, very clever. It’s packed with ruminations of the lost significance of the household arts and what we’d call ‘women’s work’, but also of their more masculine domestic counterparts, like gardening and lawnmowing (Delia’s husband’s job). There are Austen references galore, in-jokes aimed at herself (‘Motherlove? You’re joking,’ says Delia when her editor suggests it as a title – it’s actually one of Adelaide’s), and lots of witty asides on words, editing and the love of books. But what makes this novel something truly special is its loving tribute to motherhood – setting all its myriad annoyances and imperfections alongside heartfelt sentences of devotion that will make your heart ache, rich as they are with the foreknowledge of impending loss. It’s a cliché to say ‘this novel will make you laugh and cry’. But it will.