Darkfall is a potent and unforgettable work of compelling writing about an adolescence lived in an Australian country town in the 1980s: desolate, dusty and bleak. Indigo Perry’s narrative is a journey of grief, arranged around a score of music from alternative and post-punk sources, music unavailable outside cities in an age before the internet. This music, she contends, provides an imagined soundtrack, a ballast, for her isolation.

Darkfall identifies a legacy of extreme toxic masculinity and gendered violence, containing little in the way of justice. The author’s deep retrospective unstitching of her reality is presented to us with profound poetic strength, uncovering the power that resilience can unleash on an adult body. It is an act of recovery and reclamation.