I enjoyed this Australian novel – the fifth by social researcher and author Hugh MacKay – although I’m not sure that it would be everyone’s cup of tea, perhaps precisely because of the things that I enjoyed so much about the story. If you like neat and tidy plots and resolutions, this might not be the book for you. If you like a book that explores various different perspectives on a particular issue or construct, this may be more up your alley.

I empathised a lot with Tom, the protagonist of the story, a ‘jaded’ counsellor who finds that the sorts of behaviours that he has developed in his professional life are having detrimental effects in his private life. This doesn’t necessarily mean that I liked him or respected all the choices that he made in his life, but I found him a well-developed character whose story made me think. And Tom was a particularly interesting narrator, because one of the most interesting things about his character was the gap between the things he’s thinking and feeling and the things he’s saying and doing.

The ‘mystery’ at the heart of the story wasn’t necessarily of interest to me, except as it pondered the book’s fundamental premise – that of ‘escape’. We’ve all dreamed of ‘escaping’ our lives (our jobs, our relationships, and may even our own selves) when things get too much for us, but this book posed questions about the different ways in which we might express these dreams in our own lives – through fantasies, harmless or not, hobbies, therapy, time out, self-sabotage, self-deception, 'escaping' into our professional roles, and perhaps also through actual flight …

It was the exploration of these issues that I enjoyed the most in this book. ( )