Craig Silvey's Honeybee is the story of a trans teenager searching for love and self-acceptance

His second novel, Jasper Jones, was published 11 years ago, to great acclaim. Set in an Australian rural town in the 1960s, it's a mystery, a crime thriller, a coming-of-age story that has since become required reading for high school students throughout the country.

Silvey's latest novel, Honeybee, couldn't be more different. It's a first-person account of a traumatised teenager navigating a troubling and lonely world - bleak, confronting, filled with adult themes, like suicide, child abuse, post-traumatic stress, gender dysphoria.

But notwithstanding the burden of the "highly anticipated" follow-up to a literary behemoth, Silvey has different aspirations for Honeybee, ones that involve classrooms and young people, but with quite a different mandate.

Like Jasper Jones, Honeybee has its origins in Silvey's imagination. But where the former began with a made-up name, and a story that sprang up alongside it, Honeybee has its roots in a very real event.

One night, six years ago, Silvey's brother and sister-in-law were returning home in Fremantle when they spotted a young person standing on the wrong side of the railing on the Canning Highway bridge - "precariously poised".

"He pulled over immediately, and called the police while my sister-in-law got out of the car and approached this young person, largely just to distract them while help was on the way," Silvey says.

"After he called the police, my brother contacted me, and I was at home and I was working, and I was immediately concerned and worried and heartbroken, connected to this event. And he continued to give me updates."

He learned, in real time, that the young person was speaking to his sister-in-law about "everything and nothing", until the reasons for the evening's events became clear.

"They were struggling with issues surrounding their gender identity, and they had lost the support of their family and their friends, they'd been kicked out of home. They were alone in the world, and found themselves in a very anguished and hopeless and helpless place," he says.

"After the police turned up, they were really quite brusque and businesslike - they grabbed this young person, dragged them back over the railing and sort of just placed them in the back of the ambulance and attended to them.

"My sister-in-law was dismissed, really, she wasn't required to give a statement, that was that. And she just drifted away from the scene."

In the following days, Silvey and his brother and sister-in-law tried in vain to reconnect with this person. But the person was swallowed up by the world - leaving only a common name and a traumatic tale.

"For me, there was a curious situation where there's a very real person, with a very real predicament and a very real, urgent problem who existed entirely in my imagination," he says.

"I kept thinking about them and worrying about them and I wanted to understand them better. I wanted to understand the forces and the pressures that had led them to that place that night."

And so, he did what he always does when he wants to understand something better - he set out to write about it.

"With no greater ambition than that at the time, I started to flesh out a character called Honeybee, and this was the story that emerged," he says.

"I started listening and started learning and reading and educating myself on the pressures and the threats that are faced by many members of the trans and gender-diverse community," he says.

"And I was alarmed and heartbroken by some of the testimonies and the statistics that I encountered, and it seemed to me to be a very urgent crisis."

His protagonist, Sam Watson, or Honeybee, starts the book in a familiar setting - on the wrong side of a railing, staring at the road far below. But there is someone else there that night, someone with an entirely different story, a separate source of pain. This is the crux of the book - the world is full of people who are hurting, but there is always the possibility of making connections, and finding light in the process.

It's not an easy read, although many readers will find it impossible to turn away. It's a call to bear witness to the pain of those we might never have tried to understand before. Sam has a troubled, unreliable mother, a cruel and violent stepfather. The world is a cold place, until patches of light begin to appear.

And, for Silvey as for the reader, there is a hell of a lot to learn in the process. He is not writing about a lived experience, and he is alert to the inevitable accusations of appropriating the voice of an already vulnerable community. But he believes he has done it right.

"The responsibility does fall on me to speak to my credentials as an ally and to reassure all readers that my approach has been very respectful and sensitive and careful and consultative," he says.

"This was the ethical framework that underpinned my approach to writing Honeybee...I think it's really important, but in the cases where authors are writing beyond their lived experience, such as my case, what's most important is that the approach is taken with care, a contextual understanding, with respect and with consultation."

That said, it's clear that his credentials as a writer are as much a key to the novel's success. Silvey has set the book through Sam's eyes; we see everything they see, feel what they feel, know what they know. But Sam is also naive, at sea, not always able to see what we see from a distance. It's a big risk to take as an author, but a calculated one.

"It's strange, it takes a lot of courage to strip back language and to write that plainly," he says. "In my career, I think I was still trying to prove myself to myself. And, you know, sometimes those doubts would bleed into the writing itself, and often led to a bit of verbosity, or flowery language that didn't necessarily have to be there. And in order to write a voice like Sam's, I think you require a certain command to commit to a voice like that, that feels so naive and simple."

And now, as is the lot of the published author, he has relinquished control over the character, and let Sam into the world. Of course, he says, the idea that the book will find its way into classrooms and become part of a modern-day teaching experience is thrilling. He has already heard from teachers who intend to do exactly that. But there are particular readers he has in mind who are even more important than the vast sea of countless high schoolers.

"My first aspiration was to honour the person on that bridge," he says. "But also, if members of the trans or gender-diverse community, particularly younger members, can open up Honeybee and see themselves represented, and understood and accepted and encouraged and hopefully galvanised, then I think that would be a really meaningful outcome for a book like Honeybee.

"You're right, it is bleak, difficult, grim reading a lot of the time, but it is ultimately a very optimistic, hopeful, life-affirming book."