Aoife Clifford

And it also was, it was that lovely thing that what is at the heart of fiction is that we are a storytelling people.

And when there's a void where we don't know the answers to something, competing stories try to fill that space and become that.

And some of the characters were so convinced by their story that we knew was absolutely wrong, but they were so convincing in the telling of it that you could see how plausible it sounded to basically send off the investigation into a whole wrong direction.

And at the same time, she had a beautiful parallel with a missing Indigenous girl who had disappeared three years earlier.

Lilia.

And the stories that are being built up around her and the different ways they were being treated.

Was this a racial difference that we don't care about Indigenous girls missing?

Or was it difference because of the ages involved?

Lilia is much older.

She's late teens.

There's a question of, did she run away?

Whereas these two Russian girls, one of the Indigenous people sort of says it's as if they invented disappearing.

We're getting so much attention of these two young girls when this is happening to Indigenous people and no one's paying attention.

And that's a story that, I mean, we've seen in this country and, you know, in other countries too, of this difference of treatment.

And I think she does that so perfectly in this book.

It's really beautifully done.

So much of fiction is trying to put order in the chaos, but in a way, because of her structure, she sort of has embraced the chaos of what does fate have in store for us, that something can come in and just totally knock your life sideways, that you've got no control of, and yet all we want to do the whole time is feel like we're in control.

And so for a lot of this book, she allows those characters to have those moments where everything turns around and you think, how do I cope?

And I love that, that sometimes you would meet a character in one story.

And, for example, the story of the young Indigenous woman who's gone to the city to study at university and is sort of having a bit of a moment of crisis.