2012 has been a watershed year in many ways. A triumphant one for feminists, marriage equality activists, K-pop, and people who are sick of reading shitty newspapers. In case you didn’t notice, there has also been a quiet revolution in Australian publishing – a wonderful renaissance of the short story.

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The story is set between the remote mountain village of Canyon and the small city of Pitch, with a cast of characters including whores, contortionists, a downtrodden family of gravediggers, a clumsy yet sensitive policeman, his upright and judgemental sisters Mary and Ann, the circus mute Otto Cirque and his dandyish brother Arcadia, and Ivorie herself, who is, if not quite a heroine, certainly the axis on which the plot turns.

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From the first pages of this debut from Melbourne writer Alice Melike Ülgezer, the reader is asked to stand in an unsteady place between two worlds. The novel opens on a ferry in the Bosporus, gazing at the islands between the Eastern and Western sides of Istanbul, and rocking in the waves of an intergenerational conversation in Turkish, English and German.

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Novels are not essays, but this one walks a line between the two forms, calcifying around the bones of an imagined manuscript by a fictional John Hughes, as rediscovered by his son. This ‘translation’ adds layers of interpretation until the annotations cohere into a kind of thesis about translation itself: the translation of reality into language, of metaphor, of fathers and sons, and the loss inherent in translations of literature.

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