[2] This entry oi the series was followed by Spirit of Progress (2011), Forever Young (2015), and The Year of the Beast (2019).

The novels have been described as a 'slow-moving, Proustian meditation on being and time'[3] and 'a deeply satisfying encounter with the empty spaces that the suburb failed to fill both between people and inside them.

'[4] In The Age reviewer Michael McGirr noted that this series of novels "has the emotional stamina needed to draw life from the same characters over three independent novels".

He concludes that the author "takes time to tell an untidy story with a gentle sense of wonder.

"[9] Katharine England, writing in The Advertiser found that the "repetitive accretion of detail, like the brush strokes of a pointillist, the echoes within the novel and from book to book, the use of tenses which base time in the present but refer constantly to past and future, contribute to the hypnotic effect of the whole.