When you read Allee Richards’ first novel, it’s tempting to make comparisons with Margaret Drabble’s groundbreaking The Millstone and Helen Garner’s Monkey Grip. In The Millstone, a brief relationship results in a pregnancy; in Monkey Grip, a circle of friends grapple with relationships and life’s vicissitudes against the backdrop of share houses and music in Melbourne’s inner north.

Eva is an actor, on the cusp of a brilliant career, but she hates acting. She gets roles without really trying, she feels like a fraud. She and her friends are at an age when their lives should be finding some direction, when the parties, the drinking, the drugs and the casual sex should be giving way to some maturity. Her closest friends, Sarah and Annie, are poles apart: Sarah is still pushing her boundaries, trying whatever she can when she can; Annie has just been nominated for a high achiever’s award; and Eva is pregnant. She met Pat at a party at Sarah’s share house. They seemed to click and over a few weeks their relationship quietly deepens but ends suddenly when Pat takes his own life. Only Sarah and Annie really know about Pat, and only they know that Eva is pregnant. How Eva navigatesthe pregnancy, how she imagines her relationship with Pat, and the importance of her friendship with Sarah and Annie is the substance of this wonderful book.

Eva quietly searches for reasons Pat suicided: she runs the conversations of their brief relationship over and over in her mind, while seeking out Travis, Pat’s best friend, trying to glean something from him without telling him about Pat and the growing baby. One thingthat doesn’t change is her resolve to see her pregnancy through despite her uncertainty about her career and on-again, off-again relationship with Fergus. Allee Richards has written short stories and plays and Small Joys of Real Life is her debut novel. I think it is very, very good.

Mark Rubbo is the managing director of Readings.