A brutal novel about childhood and damage in Australian suburbia.

The novel follows a young girl living with her mother, younger brothers, and stepfather — a mechanic whose garage, car manuals and dismantled machinery become the language through which she tries to understand danger, sex, power and survival.

Tiffany writes with a horrible precision: bodies become parts, families become systems, and violence is registered not through melodrama but through observation, procedure and torque. It is a novel of fragments, technical diagrams, silence, and menace — a book that understands how children often survive by becoming forensic. There’s no decorative trauma here. Just the cold intelligence of a mind learning where the weak points are.

Text Publishing paperback, 2019. Good condition with light general wear.