In a secluded Australian valley, the Müller family is attempting to live around a newly formed absence.

Evangeline has withdrawn into her painting, Stefan into the practical rituals of work, while their daughters negotiate the atmosphere left by the death of a child. At the same time, the local bee population begins to vanish, introducing another form of disappearance: ecological, collective and harder to contain within the language of private grief.

Juchau builds the novel through fragments of memory, image and bodily sensation, allowing family history and environmental disturbance to echo without collapsing into neat symbolism. The bees matter materially, but also alter the scale of the book: one household’s suffering sits inside larger systems of extinction, inheritance and failed attention. Published in 2015, the novel belongs to an early wave of contemporary Australian fiction in which climate anxiety enters domestic life not as distant catastrophe but as atmosphere. For readers interested in grief, family secrecy, ecological fiction and novels that work through accumulation rather than revelation.

Bloomsbury, 2015. First edition, first printing hardcover. Light shelf wear; internally clean.