The sense of some deeply melancholic encounter haunts the pages of Australian writer Shaun Prescott's winningly glum debut novel, aided by elegiac musings on belonging and estrangement, growth and decay, places and voids, portals and dead-ends ... Like much about this simultaneously realist and absurdist novel, that word "disappearing" hovers at the line between the figurative and the literal ... Executed with a mixture of conviction and laconic humour that gives them a fresh appeal ... Painful wit ... An engaging, provoking novel nevertheless, intelligently alive to its own metaphorical possibilities, and leaving behind a powerful vision of the world ending, not with a bang, but a whimper. The Guardian