In Mandy Beaumont’s debut novel, the vengeance of the mythological Greek Furies is wrought upon an Australian outback town. Cynthia – Cyn – was 16 when her younger sister, Mallory, was killed and her mother taken away by the police. Abandoned by her father soon after, Cyn remains alone in her childhood home, haunted by the echoes of death.

The Furies is a novel steeped in violence. From the drought-ravaged landscape to the blood-soaked floors of the abattoir where Cyn works, Beaumont constantly reinforces the novel’s core theme, which is the violence enacted upon the bodies of women and girls. Cyn learns this violence at the abattoir, takes it into her body, wondering ‘if the men are like this with their women. With their children. If someone will be like that with me one day, this place out here hushing fear and folding the echoes of wrongdoings under the cracking soil.’

Against the violence rises up the chorus of the Furies, wronged and relentless. But will Cyn, like her mother, be overwhelmed by them, or will she find a way to survive? The Furies is driven by an urgent sense of injustice, and while the novel lacks the subtlety of some of its peers, it is nonetheless an ambitious, complex story about freedom and the power of collective rage. Beaumont adds her words, her fury, to the collective cries of women everywhere. Her debut is an ambitious, layered attempt to revive the women whose lives might otherwise be forgotten, and give voice to those who continue to struggle alone.

Bec Kavanagh is a bookseller at Readings Kids.