Krissy Kneen

I think it's a wonderful story.

The characters are so fully created and you love them and you hate them and they take you on an emotional rollercoaster.

But it is very much a novel of place and landscape.

And I know Lucy Treloar has visited this area, but she doesn't come from it.

And yet she creates it as though we're there with wet feet with her

And the writing is just beautiful.

It's not overly lyrical, but it is atmospheric and really, I think, highly skilled.

I think she's really, I mean, she can't win a Miles Franklin for this because it's not set in Australia, but I'd love her to win a Pulitzer.

I really think it's top class writing.

Oh, there are so many passages I could read to you, but perhaps as we're talking about language and imagery, I'll just read a passage from early in the book.

For a minute we are moving through the salted ossuary of ancient docks.

Here a ribcage, there a raised arm, and at the ends of each dock the old oyster shanties, which somewhat resemble skulls with their sunken, rust-weeping eyes and rattled paint.

lines of silvered posts strike out to sea and if i were very tall and steady of foot and impossibly agile i would leap from one to the next across the water and at the last one turn and see this lost world anew a low stretch of grasses standing and falling like the pelt of a living thing on the ocean's surface and on it rising from it my house high and vast appearing to thrust what's left of the island beneath the waves

Yes, it is.

It certainly has comparisons with Cormac McCarthy's The Road.

But there's much more humanity and even glimmers of hope, isn't there?

And moments of joy.

Yes, all the way through.

There are good people.

The world does seem divided in this book into bad people and good people.