The Book of Emmett, Melbourne journalist Deborah Forster’s first novel, offers a relentlessly grim but nonetheless engagingly written and often quite moving look at a distinctly dysfunctional family.

The novel is set mostly in Footscray, in Melbourne’s inner-west, and focuses on the life and death of the title character. Emmett Brown is extraordinarily contradictory. On the one hand, he is a ‘brutal’ alcoholic who instils fear into the hearts of his children and wife; conversely, he is revealed to be a ‘learned’ man who attempts to give his children the kind of cultural capital which he was denied during his own troubled childhood. He does this by exposing them to encyclopedias and the ballet.