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unconventional premise, grounding it in reality. However, this characterisation – alongside the omniscient narrator’s frequent comments and observations, and the setting’s Wintonesque tone, its ubiquitous Australianness unattached to a specific city or year, but rather imbued with a nostalgic sense of ‘back then’ – relieves much of the narrative tension after the first few chapters. After a low-stakes story, this reassuring and heart-warming novel builds to a page-turning conclusion.

Quirky and strange, these two débuts are charming, even comforting reads. Compulsion, by contrast, is a raucous serenade to wild, heady, narcissistic youth. There are no half measures in this book: Scott’s prose is like neon, vibrant to the point of fatigue; the characters are unanimously pretentious, self-consciously earnest, obnoxious imitations of people – entirely unlikeable, yet nevertheless mesmerising, much like the protagonists of HBO’s Succession; the many conversations and musings about music, art, sex, drugs, and philosophy are over-the-top, performative proofs of intelligent life.

‘Are you an existentialist?’ Robin asks Lucy at their first meeting. They are hiking along a nature trail, Lucy in a 1980s confection of mesh and hot pink, Robin in jeans and an Einstürzende Neubaten T-shirt. ‘That’s an asshole thing to go around declaring,’ she replies. ‘But if you define it as Sartre does, of creating oneself constantly through passionate action, then yes. Someone I call The Unspoiled Monster calls me a weaponised existentialist.’ This characterisation is sharp, intentional, borderline satire: ‘They’re so busy being clever they don’t realise how stupid they sound,’ Meg, an outsider to Lucy’s Abergele clique, observes. ‘Lucy was exactly the same in high school – she hasn’t grown up one bit.’ Drunken dinner discussions are platforms for fanatical analyses of songs, albums, esoteric genres, and pop hits alike, each critical observation an impassioned, overblown fever dream of opinion. Spontaneous trips to nightclubs allow these fanatics to wax poetic about all the music that is and was – ‘They danced to Can and Colder and Colourbox and Das Kabinette and Deux and Fad Gadget and Gay Cat Park and Grauzone and Kazino and Krisma and M83 and Mu and Vicious Pink and Vitalic; an alphabetical trawl through the abject’ – and to music that doesn’t yet exist, but should.

It should be a pagan, mechanistic death-rave, with drums like a heart, a metronome, a steam valve. It should be the best 12’ that Flock of Seagulls never wrote: waves, birds and cicadas synthesised to wet lustre and processed so heavily they tip from real to fake, then back to real. It should be a knife slitting water; tantamount to hearing Bach or ‘Father Figure’ for the first time. It should have the combined urgency and languor of a speedball. It should be Simon Le Bon playing ‘November Rain’ on the piano, in a cabaret bar, at the world’s end.

Compulsion is a paean to obsession, an intense dismantling of its debauched highs, a clear-eyed examination of its selfdestructive drives, and a contemplation on the value of existing without it. g