Walter Kovak works in an insurance company, travelling to work each day by the 7.15 a.m. train from Wintergardens in Melbourne’s west. In the first few pages, Sievwright establishes Walter as a nonentity, devoid of memorable features. ‘He was completely inconsequential. Inconsequentiality covered him like an invisible lacquer.’ He is unhappily married, unfulfilled by his monotonous work, and his only interest seems to be the collection of statistics about the causes of death.

Yet Walter is distinguished by having been the sole survivor in his carriage in a suburban train crash a year earlier. Suffering ‘post-traumatic retrograde amnesia’, Walter has no memory of the day of the crash or of the week leading up it. Throughout the course of the book, however, moments from the time resurface, while at the same time he starts to receive random warnings from strangers that Walter perceives as saving him from similarly life-threatening potential accidents.

There is nothing hurried in the narrative, yet Sievwright retains the reader’s attention throughout, right up to its memorable and unexpected climax. Sievwright is a little too heavy-handed at the beginning of his book in his characterisation of Walter’s mediocrity. I felt a more confident writer would have shown more faith in his reader to fill in the gaps, but the book soon finds its stride as other characters, events, and its finely observed detail carry it through to a memorable and satisfying climax.