A first novel written with fine-honed discretion and linking three generations of very ordinary Australians, this book has a satisfying sense of the continuities and disjunctions within families.

The story is rich in small, telling details and wonderfully laconic verbal exchanges (if that is not too heady a word) between couple whose feeling towards each other have been long eroded by habit. Yet it remains a novel in sepia colours. Like the numerous photographs that get picked up in the tale, there is a sort of immobilised concentration that gives the book its elegiac tone. There is not much direct action.