LIGHTNING by Felicity Volk (Picador)is an astonishing debut novel boasting pure, perfect crystalline prose, a prodigious intellect, and a propensity of storytelling talent and technique.

In Scheherezade style, Volk beguiles her reader with stories hewn from folk tale and begat by the Bible, rendered and imbued into the narrative of Persia, protagonist par excellence, in this road trip mosaic.

Marooned from her midwife due to the devastating bushfires conflagrating her Canberra home, Persia’s pregnancy ends in still birth.

Carefully preserving the kid’s corpse, Persia packs it and heads off on a bizarre road trip, first hitching a ride with a truckie then teaming up with an Pakistani refugee (or is he) with a medical degree.

He also has a penchant for stories, using them as smokescreen to his true identity to avoid detection from the authorities.

“I have an epic of experiences attached to the places of my youth… a place where dreams are put on ice and melt and run into the gutters outside refugee camps…they wash onto the dirty streets and the city’s people muddy their feet in the slush of those dreams.”

Big, bold, beautifully written, LIGHTNING is full of sound and thunder signifying much. There’s a crafting of story that’s sublime in its precise particular care, precious in its perception of people and place, revelatory in the power of story in our lives.

Felicity Volk is the latest great find in Australian publishing, joining Carrie Tiffany in the prestigious Picador imprint. Like Tiffany, expect Volk to be in the forefront of best lists and recipient of prizes. LIGHTNING is a lightning strike on the Australian storytelling scene, a bolt of brilliance – flash, electric, startling.