With his collection Absolute Event Horizon and the novel Candy, Luke Davies has quickly established himself as one of Australia’s most thoughtful and unflinching writers. Running With Light sees him delivering on the promise of his earlier work, as well as branching out in rich new directions, as he wrestles vigorously with ways of appreciating the physical and emotional worlds in all their complexity. Balancing on the dividing line between the colloquial and the formal, Davies presents himself and the universe around him in a way that makes the familiar disconcertingly foreign, and the foreign strangely familiar. In doing so, he causes us to look again at the world and ourselves through surprising, provoking filters. Confronting in its exploration of love, mortality and our aloneness, Running With Light is a volume that encourages us to engage with the sanctity of our elemental surroundings, and to recognize ourselves there.