That football culture is ever-present in Melbourne is a given. Whether you love it, hate it or are indifferent to it, chances are you’ll still know a good deal about it. On a cultural level, its teams and flags are a tangled roadmap of suburban and generational loyalties. In the pub or workplace, its personalities, triumphs and controversies drive conversation like an uncontrollable rumour. On an economic level, it’s a multi-billion-dollar industry. So, whether you’re a fan of the game or not (and I’m not), Anna Krien’s brilliant new book, Night Games, will hold many a revelation.

Krien’s first book, Into the Woods: The Battle of Tasmania’s Forests, enjoyed huge success, and Night Games is her second full-length work of literary journalism. The book begins with the 2010 grand final – in which the Pies beat the Saints after the first match ended in a draw – and the rumour of a pack rape that began to circulate in the days that followed. Something had taken place at a celebratory party at a townhouse in Dorcas Street, South Melbourne. Two Collingwood footballers were linked to the incident, but in the end a young man, also a footballer, though not with the AFL, was charged. Krien follows the vein of the case and its tributaries throughout, all the while stepping further and further back to take a look at the football industry as a whole: its treatment of men and of women, jock culture and media obsession, sexual power play and sexual assault.

The blurb aligns Night Games with the first-person journalistic style of Helen Garner. But where Garner’s persuasion lies with her overwhelming empathy for characters and their laments, Krien’s deftness is to be found in her ability to draw into focus a world of immeasurable complexity. Krien is balanced, yes, but never do you feel that she lacks an opinion. Rather, she lets the facts speak for themselves. That the AFL still relies on a kind of masculine monoculture is evident. But a deeper truth is at stake here, and it is this challenge that Krien is intellectually concerned with. For both genders, we lack utterly the language with which to articulate the grey area between sexual will and sexual consent. Culturally, legally and socially, we are mute, and confused. We don’t even know how to play the game that we’re in, and the rules are as good as a rigged roll of the dice.

It is all this and more that makes Night Games one of the most incredible works of investigative non-fiction that I have ever read. Krien is nuanced and fiercely intelligent, and every paragraph is addictive, leaving you thirsting for more as if in a thriller. This is something that will switch your understanding of football into awesome technicolour, as well as strike it through with the deepest unease.

Jessica Au is the editor of the Readings Monthly and an occasional bookseller down at Readings St Kilda. Her first novel, Cargo was published in 2011.