The seemingly effortless flow of Jumaana Abdu’s Translations is wonderfully deceptive; beneath their beautiful arrangements, her words are muscular and precise. From the beginning, Abdu sweeps the reader into the story, seats them inside the car with Aliyah and her nine-year-old daughter, Sakina, as they drive away from past tragedies in Sydney towards their new home on a run-down property in rural New South Wales.

Aliyah’s father has recently died, and her ex-husband is overseas, running away from their mutual loss. In this new life, Aliyah seeks to honour her father’s teachings and live out their horticultural plan, work part-time as a nurse at the hospital in the nearest town, and raise her child in peace. Almost as soon as they arrive, Aliyah finds she must wrestle with the importance of community, as friendships, new and old, challenge her determined, self-protective independence. With her new boss and friend at the hospital, Kamilaroi midwife Billie, and her farmhand, a reserved Palestinian man she thinks of as ‘Shep’, Aliyah carefully weighs each disclosure and question ventured, even as they too step forward to the brink of enquiry and pause, sometimes retreating and biding their time, sometimes leaping into the breach. Abdu explores these dynamics with a radiant compassion that is utterly compelling and also infuses her examination of the tension between each individual’s sense of their physical self and of what is conceptualised in Translations as the soul; a tension particularly prone to sudden expansion and contraction in the long wake of trauma.

As Aliyah and Sakina settle in, local history and the return of a friend from Aliyah’s childhood destabilise their world again. Matters ultimately come to a head at the peak of an ominous fire season.

Translations is an absorbing and deeply moving debut novel from a writer whose name will surely become a regular feature on literary prize lists.