I’m addicted to heroin and pacing the streets of Wollongong. I can’t get anything right. I can’t even rob my own grandmother without fucking it up. That’s the thing with good books, the protagonist might be unlikeable, the action absurd and self-defeating, but they take us in. We imagine ourselves into characters and worlds that are utterly foreign, sometimes beguiling and frustrating. I’m currently re-reading Christine Howe’s Song in the Dark and it’s set in the Illawarra, where I live. I love this immediacy: I know the world I’m imagining. Still, I’m grateful every time I put the book down. It’s a top read, don’t get me wrong. But Howe writes about addiction without glamour, and when Paul’s jonesing for a hit on Crown Street, I feel like I’m there with him—eyeing off the ATM at the bottom of the mall, the woman in heels clipping up to it, punching in her PIN. She’s got all that money she doesn’t need. Seriously, what’s she going to do with it? Pay rent?

Howe’s writing is tight. Her imagery is inventive and as I read this thin book, I’m aware that brevity is by no means a reflection of effort. This work has been sanded by hand. Take, for example, a passage towards the end, when Paul returns to Wollongong: