It’s hard to believe that The God of No Good is Sita Walker’s first book. Almost from the outset, Walker establishes the stakes: ‘Love and pain are two fangs of the same snake. You cannot be pierced by one without also being poisoned by the other.’ It’s not immediately clear where the story will take you, but before you’ve made it far there’s a divorce ambush over vanilla slice, several break-ups with God (‘He left God like Noel Gallagher left Oasis … My break-up with the Almighty was more like a French exit.’), the threat of new romantic love (along with its conspicuous, neighbour-alerting flower picking), and a strong through-line in pithy observations about human nature.

A Brisbane-based teacher and writer, Walker’s memoir reads like a novel and is by turns haunting and hilarious. She has an effortless way with prose, capturing something essential about everyday moments with a deft turn of phrase that gracefully moves between resonant sadness (‘Grief sits in the bones. It burrows deep into marrow and becomes a part of the way a person moves, how their eyes see the light.’) and amusing self-deprecation (‘You were really wonderful, exclamation mark? Hopeless. Earnest, rainbow Paddle Pop fool.’). She takes the reader with her as she recovers from the unexpected end of her marriage, and then finds new love. Along the way, she reflects on her family history and how it has shaped those she loves, and how they love. The tales flit back and forth in time over several generations, and across the world – Adelaide, Thursday Island, Iran, India, Sri Lanka, Czech Republic, and beyond. Central to all the stories are five wonderful matriarchs, and their profound Bahá’í faith.

At the heart of this beautiful memoir is a trinity: Walker’s crisis of faith – in God and in herself; love, of all kinds; and family. By the end, it is apparent that Walker and her family have an extraordinary gift for love; also, that they have been overendowed with love’s excruciating losses. Death snatches the young with appalling frequency and colludes with illness to take those who have long borne stoic witness to the earlier tragedies. Yet, somehow, this memoir is anything but grim – in fact, it is a joy.