Want a story that leaps off the page? Leap into LEAP.

With a narrative that has all the agility, grace and momentum of parkour, Myfanwy Jones’ novel is leaps and bounds ahead of the pack in recent published fiction.

LEAP embodies and ennobles no less the great themes of love, loss, grieving and coping, in a splendid story of Joe, a young Melbourne man dream dashed and guilt bashed by the death of his beloved, Jen, and of Elise, mother of the beloved Jen, devastated by the death of her daughter and the dying of her marriage.

Cheer up. Jones doesn’t allow wallowing in what could have been a weeping wipe the floor tale of woe.

Oh, no, since losing Jen, Joe has launched himself into a peak performer of parkour, l’ art du deplacement, focusing his mental and physical energies on this exhilarating and exhausting practice.

And Elise has taken to visiting the zoo to commune with the tigers and paint them, their feline grace and majesty giving some solace as well as an outlet for emotional and creative energy.

Both are pursuing, consciously and unconsciously, a view past the panorama of pointlessness that presented in the wake of Jen’s passing.

These personal paths of coping, parkour and painting, do not constitute solitude, however, and the novel teems with equally fascinating characters as the two satellites who orbit a common grief.

For Joe, it’s his flatmates, Sanjay and Jack, and the new move in, a nurse whose ministrations nurture the healing process. There’s the delinquent, Deck, that Joe is kind of mentoring and there’s Lena, the Ukrainian cook who works at the same joint as Joe, and Joe’s uncle Todd who tends a nursery with a notion of bequeathing the plants and plot to his nephew. If this novel ever gets a television version, I’d tag Tony Barry for Todd.

For Elise, apart from the tigers, a feline affiliation she shares with her late daughter, there’s her bestie Jill and an old flame, who flickers waveringly on a spent wick, all real heat extinguished.

Her marriage to Adam is on life support – “this is their disease: there is only ever after.” – happy endings or not.

LEAP is a remarkable and robust read, a must read about recovery and reclamation, about running, climbing and leaping through the rugged landscape of life, with its peaks and troughs, its agonies and ecstasies.

LEAP by Myfanwy Jones is published by Allen & Unwin. RRP 26.99. Ten percent of royalties from the book will go towards the WWF Save the Tiger now campaign: www.savetigersnow.org.