The book. The book. A great big readable tome, 150,000 words, straight into paperback, and as far as Ali was concerned no better and no worse than her previous three novels, which had been modestly well received in Australia but were unheard of anywhere else. But Tell the Story, Sing the Song was officially a phenomenon. A quiet start after publication, then a speedy, influential burst of online reviews, a flood of sales, book club fever, and a scramble by the publisher to get the next print run out, then a phone call to her agent in early October from Baz Luhrmann’s office: name the price for the rights, they said; Baz wants this, Nicole’s on board, so’s Hugh. Thousands of books were selling each week around the world, and Ali’s paltry advance had earned out in record time. For the first time in her life she was making money from her writing, and Jenni Murray, in an interview for Woman’s Hour on BBC Radio 4, was asking her how this felt.

‘Unreal,’ Ali said, headphones on, alone at the green baize desk in an ABC recording suite. Through the glass wall she was looking directly at Cass who’d come into the studios with her and was sitting at the panel, reapplying her make-up and listening in. A young studio manager chewed gum and looked thoroughly disengaged, but she kept a weather eye on the levels, and the mics.

‘Unreal, and slightly obscene,’ Ali added.

‘Obscene?’ Jenni Murray said. ‘That’s an unusual choice of word.’

‘Well, I find myself in an unusual situation,’ Ali said. She could feel it happening again; feel the drawbridge coming up. And the sound of her own voice in this situation stunned her. Her accent was considered very English, comically so, among her family and friends in Adelaide, but now she heard the broadcaster’s rich, modulated, faintly plummy tones and her own voice bore no comparison. It lacked substance, she thought: a thin, hybrid drawl. On her side of the window, Cass made sweeping gestures with her hands, urging her to expand. Ali nodded. Yeah, yeah, hang loose.

‘Does the money make you feel uncomfortable?’

‘It makes me think,’ Ali said, ‘about the arbitrary nature of success.’

‘So you didn’t know, when you had the idea for Tell the Story, that it might strike gold?’

‘Well, no, of course I didn’t,’ Ali said. ‘My three other books had done nothing of the sort, and to be honest I think they have no less merit than this new one. Sometimes a book just captures the public imagination, I suppose.’

‘So why do you think it succeeded in the way it has?’