You never forget your first love, the saying goes, and New Skin, the debut novel from celebrated screenwriter and producer Miranda Nation, examines this idea over a period of 20 years.

Alex and Leah are second-year medical students in Melbourne in 1997. Both feel thwarted in their choices. Leah’s dream is to act, but her middle-class family is pleased she is doing something ‘useful’. Alex lives with a tyrannical father who beats him, berates Alex’s mother, and favours Alex’s sister. Alex avoids home as much as possible and doesn’t mention his home life to anyone in his course.

On Leah’s 19th birthday, Alex and Leah begin sleeping together, but neither admits the depth of their connection. While the relationship remains sexual, there are key moments suggesting how it could be – open, caring and uncomplicated. In these moments, I wanted to scream at the characters, ‘Just do it!’, ‘Take a leap of faith!’ But, of course, that’s not how novels work!

Miranda Nation has created two troubled and vulnerable characters. In alternating chapters, the reader sees how their lives progress – with and without each other. Outwardly, Leah is the more sensitive one. She literally wears her pain: battling an extreme eating disorder and becoming unhealthily thin. Alex, however, keeps his emotions and desires to himself, seemingly afraid of echoing his father’s behaviour. Instead, he turns to drug use to calm his mind. The novel has many ‘sliding doors’ moments. When Alex is available for a relationship, Leah isn’t. Regional and international distance also keep them apart at key times.

The novel paints an accurate picture of the inner northern suburbs of Melbourne in the late 1990s. The university, the streets of Brunswick and Carlton, and the bars around Fitzroy will make many local readers smile with recognition.

Ultimately, the question at the heart of this perceptive and highly compelling novel is not about remembering or forgetting your first love, but about knowing the right time to let your first love go.