In the late 1990s I had a vivid dream about my old street in Glenroy where I grew up. In the dream my father (who is now dead), my mother and I were standing on the street, pausing in front of a vacant paddock and staring at the swaying grass. I knew, the way we know things in dreams, that it was summer. That it was a Saturday night in 1957 and from the colour of the sky that it was early evening. We all had our best clothes on: my father in a starched, white shirt, my mother in her best summer dress, and me in a striped shirt with a button-down collar that I’d forgotten all about until the dream retrieved it.

The dream was what we would now call virtual in its reality, the three of us a kind of tableau vivant that I felt I could walk around as I would a sculpture. The vividness and the urgency of the dream prompted a novel that, over three drafts, eventually became The Art of the Engine Driver. I was convinced it would be a one-off book and would finally get this Glenroy thing off my chest: that my old street and my old patch of Glenroy, a rectangle of land about two kilometres long and one kilometre wide, could yield only one book.