"Aliyah took the blow. She turned away and pressed her hand hard across her eyes. This crisis, which should have swept the two women together, had instead torn open an honesty that marooned them almost two decades apart. Perhaps the closest they had ever been was the moment they had first met, drawing blood, and every meeting thereafter had been an attempt to regain an irretrievable intimacy."

This is a breathtakingly good debut. Abdu brings us a tale of psychological intensity, spun in taut, tense prose and set on a haunted property isolated enough to feel unmoored while close enough to a small community to feel scrutinised. At the centre of the book and the house is Aliyah, whose self-reliance has long since passed healthy. She is shadowed by Shep, a local imam whose own demons sit, at first, comfortably alongside her own, and then by Hana, a woman struggling not to be defined by victimhood. The brightly insouciant daughter of Aliyah binds all, and then Billie, a local Kamiliroi nurse, and her family.
These people push and pull at each other, both repelled and attracted by each others' needs and wants. Abdu explores the discomfort of love, the difficulty of distinguishing self.  Shep and Aliyah revel in silence. The language, the constructed sentences, rise and fall in an almost soothing way, even while laying out hard, sparse disconnects. The book can feel unbearably lovely at times, elevating the stuff of friendship, survival and love to something transcendent.
Abdu's focus is tightly on the emotions of the characters, which are focused on their immediate lives, but a broader social critique informs the book. Aliyah and Hana have lives marked by their gender - "From these men she knew only that to express resentment, to hint at any restlessness or dissatisfaction was to intimate a desire bordering dangerously on need, which, no matter its nature, was received as a threat to their ideal of social stability, hormonal predictability, and lifelong virility, considered so alarming that Aliyah always felt obliged to rally reassurance that her disquiet was but a passing phase. If that failed, there was always the option of blaming female hysteria and requesting a prayer for either exorcism or pity. In the weeks before leaving the city, she had wished her father’s house would collapse on her to grant her some relief. In the last days of her marriage, she had sat on their penthouse balcony and watched planes fly low overhead, gripped by a superb terror when for a moment it seemed a plane might stoop so low as to crash into her building, low enough to crush her, suffocate her, obliterate everything.". Shep is Palestinian, a refugee from the 2009 Gaza attacks. The emotional lives of the characters revolve around these issues, and the concepts of land ownership. In speaking to Billie, Shep explains: ""The violence of a settler colony pushed me out of my land, only for me to come here where the same violence is ongoing. I do to you what was done to me. And those who forced me to escape slaughter were once forced to do the same. Like a chain of loss and expulsion, only none of us get back what was ours. It takes a hypocrite to flee from occupied land to a land of the occupied, or maybe just a desperate man, but you can’t say that you don’t expect me to take responsibility when I say that I expect it from Israeli children who were born and raised on the land I consider my own, which is also the only land they have ever known. The two thoughts can’t be reconciled, and yet I live here, I want to plant my feet here, and I also hate that feet are planted where I lived before, so I’m ashamed. I know what’s yours.’"
These interweavings arise naturally, an inevitable part of telling the stories of these characters because they are an inextricable part, and hence never feel like a distraction.
The book is not quite perfect. The pacing is uneven - there are times where the plot seems to spin wheels when it shouldn't. Some of Billie's early dialogue feels a little like exposition (a trend I am starting to notice with Aboriginal characters in Australian fiction, who sometimes seem to want to explain colonialism and how it has personally affected them to the main character as soon as they meet them). And I'm not sure the book really needed the bushfire, as opposed to the impeding threat of it. But these are quibbles in a book which manages to draw out the complexities of living on unceded land, in a terribly traumatising world, without ever being about anything except Aliyah and her crew, and their extraordinarily drawn emotional lives.