The theme of emotional fracture is kicked off as a married couple return home to Newcastle in 1989 just one day after the earthquake has shaken the city.

We’re gradually introduced to a group of loosely connected people and watch as birth, life, love, sickness and death affect their lives and make them force them to think about things many of them rather wouldn’t.

Cullen’s prose is extremely sparse and very little that’s said really conveys much story — just like in real life. Markers for turns into the plot come from innocuous happenstance or reveals peppered throughout the story almost as if by accident, making the things that cause upheaval almost mundane.

There’s a very disconcerting sense of pacing, where the book might take a page and a half to depict every minute detail about a character making a pot of coffee before casually informing us that days or years have passed in a single sentence elsewhere, too many of these long swathes of description seeming to have nothing to do with the story.

Not every character has a beginning or end, and the cleverly constructed 11-year time span is more of a snapshot of people in the business of living.

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