All These Perfect Strangers (Aoife Clifford, S&S)

Pen Sheppard is recovering at her rural family home after an assault she won’t discuss with anyone, let alone her psychologist. As she prowls the house, avoiding everyone inside and outside its walls, she relives the exhilaration, fear and tedium of her time at university before the attacks cut it short. At first university seems like a chance at freedom, an escape from the town that kept her criminal past current news. But campus life—where friends share rooms and no-one needs to leave the grounds—only narrows her world further. And when the violence starts, the threads of Pen’s past troubles start to tighten around her again. The more Pen reveals, the less clear it becomes whether she is innocent, guilty, or simply unable to discover the truth. This is a brilliantly claustrophobic take on the unreliable narrator story, with an engaging mystery that unravels as the central character does. Debut author Aoife Clifford transports readers back to the late-eighties and early-nineties with her skilful use of dialogue and prose, never resorting to Bon Jovi or shoulder pad references; here, Australian small-town suspense meets a moment of youth sorely underrepresented in crime writing.

Fiona Hardy is a bookseller at Readings Carlton and secretary of the Australian Crime Writers Association

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