FRIENDS AND DARK SHAPES

A young journalist details her life in a rapidly gentrifying Sydney suburb of Redfern.

The narrator in Bedford’s debut novel is approaching 30, sharing a house with a group of friends who are, like her, second-generation Australians. (The narrator is “half-Indian, half-Anglo” and complains that she is mistaken for a Spanish tourist; her housemates’ families hail from Cambodia and Palestine.) At the novel’s beginning, the three are looking for a housemate, someone to join in their booze-fueled philosophical conversations or their late-night art gallery strolls, stealing free wine and cheese from wealthy gentrifiers. The fourth housemate, a musician the gang calls Bowerbird, moves in one spring, as the narrator reels in the aftermath of losing her father, something that sets her slightly apart from her friends, who have not yet experienced such losses. (“Grief oozes from the pores and radiates outward, so people catch the scent on you,” the narrator opines.) The novel spans the period of a year, moving from spring to spring as the housemates wander the city and negotiate their relationships with each other, with their families, with partners, and, most of all, with the city that grows more and more beloved to them even as it transforms nearly beyond recognition. Bedford’s own background is in both anthropology and journalism, and those are the genres that the book most resembles; the narrator can never stop stepping back and observing with a coolly ethnographic eye, whether she is visiting a local shoe repair shop and conversing with the Lebanese immigrants there or sweatily dancing in a converted church with strangers. As a slice of life from a young millennial in Australia’s most multicultural city, the book is engaging; as a novel, it doesn’t hang together.

A captivating setting that stands in the way of a singular story.