An eerie and precise Australian novel of twinship, exile, survival and feminine knowledge.

Its world is half domestic, half post-catastrophic: women leaving, hiding, mapping, burying what can be saved, working out how to move through danger by attention, ritual and practical intelligence. The title is doing a lot of work here — chaos not just as disorder, but as a sister, a double, a force one lives beside.

The book has that Spinifex Press intensity of being feminist, literary, politically alert, interested in women’s bodies, memory, shelter, borders, and the structures people build when ordinary safety has failed. It looks like a quiet novel from the outside, but the prose has a lovely severity to it — maps, houses, sisters, communications, survival systems, the emotional geometry of dependence and separation. For readers of Australian feminist fiction, speculative literary fiction, dystopian-adjacent writing that doesn’t announce itself with genre furniture, and books about sisters, aftermath, and the fragile architecture of escape.

Spinifex Press paperback. Published in Australia by Spinifex Press in 2010; copyright Lara Fergus 2010; this copy states reprinted 2010. Good second-hand condition, with light handling, minor shelfwear and page toning.