Millie is in her final year of high school at ‘Our Lady’s’, a Catholic school that Abbey Lay ensures is dripping with recognisable details of at least an element of every Australian’s education experience. The school is not our – nor Millie’s – focus though, as she grapples with the guilt and comfort of breezing through assessments without ‘effort’. No, our focus is Olive.

Olive is an enigma of theatre studies and strikingly blunt, philosophical conversations. She’s also Millie’s neighbour. As they become friends, Millie finds herself enamoured. School is naught but a way to see Olive, high school dating but a way to connect with her. The two girls bond over discussions of new sexual experiences. As Millie is allowed into Olive’s home, she notices some oddities about Olive’s rather traditional family, oddities she can’t quite place, and wonders how much Olive herself is influenced by them.

Lead Us Not is the kind of book I pick up and ravenously tear through, before falling back into reality when I see ‘Acknowledgements’ listed on the next page. It is incredibly immersive, and you never know more than Millie does – thus tension is ever-present. We equally experience her confusion, and her resigned frustration at what is in front of us, just out of reach. Her all-consuming devotion to her new friend is understandable, even admirable. Lay crafts an insular, intoxicating narrative that will keep you absorbed until the very last page.