Diana Reid’s 2021 novel Love and Virtue was an outstanding debut that saw Reid named one of Sydney Morning Herald’s Best Young Novelists of the Year. At first, her new novel, Seeing Other People, looks to be a light-hearted story of two sisters re-entering life post pandemic. The cover is bright and quirky – the kind that you might see on summer reading lists or on BookTok. The characters ‘seeing other people’ are the Hamor sisters: Charlie aged 21, and Eleanor, slightly older. The novel opens with Eleanor and her boyfriend Mark breaking up. Mark has committed an alcohol- fuelled indiscretion, and he wants Eleanor to hear the details, but she refuses out of self-preservation. Charlie is an actor who is beginning to work again after the two-year hiatus of the pandemic. She begins a relationship with an older woman in her share house – Helen – who is also the director of her current play. While Helen views the relationship as casual, Charlie falls hard for her.

Seeing Other People explores the value of work and pay in arts industries versus the value and stability of ‘conventional’ employment. Charlie and her housemates are all ‘struggling artists’, whereas Eleanor and her flatmate Seb are in corporate roles. Eleanor is expected to love her job, but she is wilting under the expectations of her older, male managers who want her to work harder and longer. Her high income isn’t even a pay-off.

Charlie on the other hand, despite early promise at a top drama school, attends auditions intermittently and struggles to pay rent. Despairing, Charlie asks Eleanor if she should give up acting, and get a ‘regular’ job.

In the resulting freedom after lockdowns, the sisters’ relationship changes over along hot Sydney summer. The novel’s title not only refers to the characters’ romantic and sexual relationships, but almost, more deeply, to how they grow to see themselves and others in new and enlightening ways.

Annie Condon is from Readings Hawthorn.