Cassie McCullough

That was where the pitch black darkness was.

I always felt an urge to reach out to that blackness, the colour of outer space.

Yes, neither did I. So

We enter this family as they're all heading there for this ancestor worship festival, Obon, and it's magical and the whole extended family gathers at the top of this mountain where you can still see touches of night.

at midday and there are lots of insects around everywhere.

It's heavy with nature.

The house itself smells pungent with animal smells and after a while I realised, oh, it just didn't smell like air conditioning or fresh carpet or paint.

It smelled authentic and real and lots of bugs are entering the house all the time and even if one of those had been seen back in the cities that they live in, they would have

freaked out, but here they just sort of let the bugs pass them by.

And then there's a cousin, you, a little boy who's also her great friend.

They just get on, like really naturally they get on.

And so I had this sort of feeling of a Studio Ghibli film as a novel and

And I was just like, oh, my God, it's a late winner.

It's a late entry, this book into one of my books of the year.

Unbelievable.

That's where I was at after that first sequence.

Even to the point where the neighbours feel like they've got to intervene and say, well, she's not really naughty, you know.

And so a lot of awful things are going on away from the heavenly ascent of Arkishina, the family ancestral home.

So, yes, we begin to, you know, the story broadens out.

And it's very interesting, actually,