Days of Innocence and Wonder (Lucy Treloar, Picador)

Lucy Treloar’s third novel centres on a woman named Till, whose life was cleaved in two when her childhood friend E was kidnapped right before her eyes 18 years ago—‘nothing had happened to Till, but something happened all the same’. Interspersed with actual events, such as Black Summer and lockdowns, the book catapults back and forth in time to trace the imprint of trauma in Till’s life, along with her reflections about what happened on that fateful day. Treloar beautifully fills in the details of Till’s peripatetic life as she traverses the countryside before finally settling down in the economically devastated regional town of Wirowie with her beloved dog Birdy—as much a fully realised character as the townsfolk who reluctantly, then wholeheartedly, embrace Till. But danger looms on the horizon for them all when Till’s past bleeds into her present. Days of Innocence and Wonder touches on guilt and culpability, the slipperiness of memory, the danger inherent in being a child and a woman, and the chasm that separates the way adults and children understand the world—all while being a commentary on place, belonging and colonisation. It’s a self-reflexive, expansive novel grounded in the beauty of the natural world with a bounty of descriptive detail. This book will appeal to readers who enjoyed Jennifer Down’s Bodies of Light, Ashley Kalagian Blunt’s Dark Mode and Shelley Burr’s Wake.

Read Sonia Nair’s interview with Lucy Treloar here.

Books+Publishing reviewer: Sonia Nair is a Melbourne-based writer and critic. Books+Publishing is Australia’s number-one source of pre-publication book reviews.

Books+Publishing pre-publication reviews are supported by the Copyright Agency Cultural Fund.

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