If you believe the hyperbole surrounding her novel – Christos Tsiolkas has pronounced it ‘masterful, poignant, powerful and true’ – Kalinda Ashton is, at thirty-one, her generation’s answer to Helen Garner: a novelist of everyday Melbourne who makes sad, daily truths pleasurable to read because her writing is so easy to consume.

The Danger Game is, at one level, a family saga and a love story. These narratives provide the novel’s emotional depth and momentum. In them, we recognise aspects of our own familial and intimate relationships: sibling rivalry, feelings of abandonment, an inability to trust. Yet the plot is not pedestrian. Ashton tugs her reader along with unexpected and dramatic revelations until the final page. At the most basic level of storytelling, this novel works exceptionally well, début or not.