Cassie McCullagh

And she's also a journalist at Q Weekend, the magazine of The Courier Mail in Brisbane.

Hello, Susan.

That's so mean, isn't it?

Susan Johnson, the people who do love Rachel Kask really love her, I notice.

What is it that you like about her?

And yet Kate and I, well, I certainly hadn't any knowledge of that kind of baggage that she came along with.

And we haven't read the other two in the trilogy.

So it's quite a different reading experience that we've had.

This book, Kudos, opens with, I think, one of the most extraordinary first chapters, if it is structurally actually a chapter, I'm not even sure, because the structure of this novel is also a major departure from just about anything I've read before, a kind of

sidles up to you and just starts in the most casual way.

And before you know it, you're hearing, she's on a plane sitting next to a guy whose legs are too long.

And before long, you know, they start this conversation and you hear this story about his family dog.

which sounds so mundane and banal, but it is the most extraordinary story.

I think it's the best first chapter I've read since Enduring Love by Ian McEwan, which had that extraordinary first chapter about the balloon incident.

Yes.

Yeah.

amazing first chapter.

And from there, it just kind of flows on in this kind of, I felt like I was inside a lava lamp with this kind of these globules of ideas kind of rising up slowly and softly.

And the language is so perfect that you just, it's just effortless and you're drawn into the next thing and you don't even know where you've been.

It's like a drug.