Aoife Clifford

It's a bit of a dark gift, this world, that gives them so much but takes a lot as well.

Yes, that's right.

For me, it was almost like a jagged sort of sharp-edged puzzle of a book because it jumps around in place, character and time a lot.

It was almost as if she was treating her novel a bit like a mirror and smashed it into sort of puzzle pieces for us to put back together in the reading, which you've got these mysteries that you get the answers to, but you've got to fit the puzzle all together to work it all out.

And I quite enjoyed that aspect of it.

Nick Cave in particular seems to be a recurring person in this book.

Yes.

So, for example, we've talked about a lot of dark things on the show, but, like, there's a lot of sly humour in here and I did have to laugh at the one where, is it Benny from Broadmeadows gets kicked out of a party at Molly Meldrum's house because Molly's convinced that Benny's brother's running off with some of Molly's stuff, which made me giggle a lot.

It sounds like it could actually have happened.

No, it had a ring of authenticity about it.

Oh, absolutely.

It's really trying to capture that whole experience.

I mean, the novel itself is about creating things because we do go into different types of creation.

Like we've got Benny, the character, ends up making instruments.

We've got Mona giving birth to her son.

And a lot of those things are really going into about the creativity, but it's music that really holds this place.

together so I mean it's almost as if each chapter is a single on a mixtape which mixtapes um form an important part of this book so that they're all out of place they're not they're not put in chronologically it's your mixtape was just the songs you loved in the order you wanted it and that's what she's done with this book that the what happens is all out of order but it then creates the album of these characters lives I think and I think she does it really well

I could almost sing every song, so I didn't actually need to do it because I did wonder what it would be like reading it if you didn't know the music because for me, each chapter title brought up so much

In an instant.

Yeah, it was a real trip down my own memory lane as well as reading about the characters.