Those are the five main characters in this unusual book. Part of the unusualness is the structure of the narrative, successive chapters being devoted to one of the characters, almost as if we have a set of individual stories, loosely connected. (It is a device used also by Amor Towles in his latest book The Lincoln Highway).

The author lives in Canada, but seems determined to remind the reader that his work is set in Australia. So we meet words like undies, boardies, barbie, sarky, aircon, the bitumen - there is even a reference to "the Libs", which may stretch understanding outside the country.

That being said, the book can be read as a kind of accolade to Eastern Australia, its easygoing people. busy cities and trouble with wildfires. And its limited vocabulary in anger or in love.

Set mainly in Sydney, "the gilded whore and everyone laughing", we are introduced to Bondi and the surfers, Parramatta Road and the traffic, Glebe and its million-dollar properties. At one stage, Lori thumbs her way to Byron Bay, where there is a festival of some sort. She has to sleep on the beach because there is "no spare bed in fifty k". Fortunately, she is rescued by two women who take her to their quiet bush retreat where she joins them in their art work, in her case making small and large sculptures. Her family think she has taken her own life and it is a year before she returns.

The chapters in which Bea is the central character are set in Silverwater Correctional Centre and then at a similar facility in Emu Plains. She takes some time to settle and to understand the written and particularly the unwritten rules of those places. While she is there, her husband Redmond begins a no-holds-barred affair with a Chinese woman. They are introduced first on a golf course, where they improve each other's golf and then she puts him in touch with foreign buyers of Sydney real estate, the kind of Pandora people that bring the ATO sniffing around and asking questions.

The author is a philosopher by training and there are places in the book where his characters take us through ruminations on life and liberty. That last is taken up in the story of Paula and her research friend Carlos, both from Venezuela and one-time fans of Hugo Chavez, now uncertain about what he left behind.

It's at times longwinded, but Sydney will love it.