Like an Antipodean cross between the Kennedys and the Kardashians, the Deans are a family whose celebrity, crimes and crazy schemes leave an indelible mark on an entire continent. The world’s most fantastically insane family story is told by Jasper, whose psychopathic, beloved uncle and hermetic, despised father changed the course of Australian history.

Uncle Terry becomes so obsessed with sportsmanship that he starts killing off star athletes accused of cheating, making him a hero in the eyes of his countrymen but an outsider from the law. Meanwhile, Jasper’s misanthropic father Martin yoyos between days of obsessive, overthinking, depression and desperately trying to forge his place in history, whether that’s through creating a labyrinth one day, or a lottery the next. Being faced with the inescapable teenage rites of passage is never easy, but with a family like Jasper’s, the commonplace becomes complicated- and entertaining.

A Fraction of the Whole is a book that’s rich in the same way the first coffee I made as a teenage waitress was rich (twenty espressos in a mug, because what kind of 16 year old knows how to make an Americano?). It’s 711 higgledy piggledy pages of fantastic ideas, hilarious observations and brilliant one liners one after the other after the other. There are lines in there that, placed in more sparse prose, would be the sparkling find in the chapter, that one passage that you have to reread a few times with a smile because it’s exactly the words you’ve been looking for, but Toltz’s novel is bursting at the seams with them and it’s impossible for all but the most patient, deliberate reader to take it all in first time round.

The effect is intoxicating; you’re a reader happily drunk on philosophy, poetry and pyrotechnics. It’s twenty remarkable novels, shredded and pasted back together to make one blazing, preposterous, epic comedy which I will gladly read every year for the rest of my life.