The mortician is obsessed with transitions – from life to death, from man to woman. Once she gets rid of her pesky priapic overhang, the narrator’s prose style seems to be clipped of all extraneousness. The language is stark and we are hooked to her persistent, insistent tone. At times the voice is so simultaneously alienating and mesmerising that we could almost mistake the book for Humbert Humbert Goes to Hobart.

The book is strewn with dead bodies, both human and animal. The shadows of her deceased parents, particularly that of her taxidermy-obsessed father, loom disturbingly over each incision and stitch. The pace – steady and measured throughout – slowed for me near the end, but perhaps that’s because I was so eager to race ahead to find out what would happen to this fascinating, messed-up person. At once sterile and intimate, Somebody to Love is an excellent, engrossing first novel.