I made a lot of notes in this book, a lot of marks on the page to remind me of particular lines or moments. A note beside the scene of retired lawyer Reg, in his lounge room, hearing his young, blood-soaked friend David confess to the murder of his wife, and telling him: ‘We cannot continue to blame women for their death.’ Another beside David’s wife Elle, hovering above her body on the floor of her laundry, slowly tracing their path to this moment, and saying of David: ‘… that somewhere within him was an intermittent fault’, then shortly afterwards, ‘… she told herself she had better find it and repair it’. Even more notes to mark all the heartbreaking, desperate, beautifully-written moments that led from a starry relationship beginning with wine and cheese and sex like a flood of water to this, a woman’s bruised body on a floor, and a man trying desperately to explain himself. But can knowing what came before change where you are now?

Elle Nolan is – was – a filmmaker. Her first romantic-comedy-satire film was an unexpected success, the second, originally begun with enthusiasm and optimism, slowly became an unexpected hardship, the script changing while her own perception of love skewed as her romance with overworked lawyer David Forrester ebbed and flowed before crashing into the rocks. This book is searingly local – the scent of marinara, white-star jasmine and smoke from the oil refineries fill the air of Melbourne’s city streets and inner-west – and upon reading it, maybe, like me, you’ll wish it wasn’t, so that you couldn’t imagine this book playing out in the house next to yours. With its slow-burn relationship, comparisons to Gone Girl are already being made, but it is nothing like it; the only comparison I would make is that it too is beautifully written, startling in its honesty, and should become a bestseller.

Fiona Hardy