The author described writing this book very quickly after a particularly vivid dream, and I totally get it. It tells about some girls at an Australian boarding school in the late nineteenth century who go to a picnic at a local beauty spot. Three of them plus a teacher go on a short walk, and SPOILER ALERT only one of them returns. They are searched for, but never found. That’s pretty much it.
This sounds kind of annoying – you never find out what happened, it is like an open-ended mystery – but it is actually weirdly compelling, and the images have stuck with me for a long time since reading it. Kind of like a dream.