One of the joys of reading – and a point of difference from narratives told on the various screens we turn to for leisure – is imagining a story’s mise en scène. Our mental pictures (termed phantasia by a group of British neurologists) are a strange alchemy of images from our memories, thoughts, and dreams. Though visualisation is not a universal experience, many readers may comment that a book-to-film adaptation was ‘exactly as I pictured it’ or else ‘nothing like what I saw in my mind’s eye’.

Bright Objects, the début novel of Melbourne-based writer Ruby Todd, excels in evoking the imagination. Todd achieves this not through the quantity or level of detail of her descriptions but through their quality. Her astute observations range from the pitch of a character’s voice to the font of a poster, and her imagery is fresh and richly hued: distance between characters is ‘like skin kept clean around a wound’, while the habitual counting of cars is ‘a rosary to measure time as it disappeared’. That this is Todd’s first book bodes well for Australian literature.