In 1996 I began the RMIT Professional Writing and Editing course, and while I didn’t share any classes with M.J. Hyland, I soon began to hear a lot about her from classmates. Not only was she an amazing writer, I heard, but a talented editor as well. Since our student days she has published three books, one of which (This Is How, 2007) was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. However it’s her first novel, How the Light Gets In (2003), which I re-read every few years.

The book begins with 16-year-old exchange student Louise Connor on a plane from Sydney to Chicago, where she will spend a year with a host family. Louise, known as Lou, is terribly afraid and also excited; she is escaping a life of poverty, crime and two older sisters who relentlessly mock her. Lou has tried to learn as much as she can about the habits of middle-class life and secretly hopes her host family will adopt her so she never has to return home. But she’s not prepared for the forceful emotional dynamics of the Harding family.

From the outset, the reader knows things are not going to be clear cut for Lou. When she asks the air hostess, ‘Could I possibly borrow some of your perfume?’, it’s apparent that Lou’s personal boundaries are compromised. The beauty of Hyland’s writing is that she builds these small, irregular moments into a surprising crescendo. Within moments of Lou meeting her host family, the mother, Margaret, takes Lou’s hand and holds it as they walk. Her host brother, James, stares at her, commenting each time she blushes. Bridget, her host sister, is both disdainful of Lou, and jealous of her mother’s affections.

Lou arrives at the Hardings’s prefabricated suburban mansion worn out, overcome with jetlag but unable to sleep. When the Hardings take a two-week road trip before school resumes, Lou’s insomnia, a pivotal problem throughout the novel, and James’s scrutiny mean that she is exhausted and underwhelmed by the trip. She has come to America to escape the close quarters of her family’s council flat in Sydney, but finds herself in even closer quarters with the Hardings.

Hyland is wonderful at evoking emotionally claustrophobic situations. The more sleepless and unwell Lou feels, the less she meets the mostly unspoken expectations of her host family; things spiral downward from here.

In Lou, Hyland has created a wonderfully flawed narrator. The reader can empathise with her desire to live a life other than the one she’s grown up with, and her humour, intelligence and wordplay converge into literature of the finest form. Lou’s vulnerability, which is at odds with her fierce desire for independence, makes you want to give her a big hug at the end of the book. But of course she would hate that!

Annie Condon