Kara has a new neighbour at Victory Park. Bridget, the glamorous ex-wife of a disgraced rich-list financier doesn’t want to live there, but the block of council flats is home to many who had less choice about it than they’d like. Kara’s raising her 5-year-old son alone, earning just enough to live on doing in-home childcare. Her neighbours include Derek and his scary neck tattoo, probably harmless Steve, deteriorating hoarder Edwin, brisk Jhanvi and now, thanks to her husband’s apparent Ponzi scheming, Bridget.

Bridget’s a goldfish out of water, but it’s not her flapping around that’s in focus. Drawn inexorably in by the opulence of Bridget’s former life and the novelty of her reckless friendship, Kara becomes distracted by the drama and trappings of wealth. Dazzled by glimpses of an alien life, and newly shy of her own, she risks losing sight of what’s really valuable to her.

Perhaps surprisingly for a novel about a solo mum treading some fairly dark waters, Victory Park is a delicious joy to read. Sharp, keenly observed, funny, Rachel Kerr’s sentences are not merely links in a chain of events pulling us to our destination but a scattering of jewels to follow through the woods. Characters are assassinated in short, clever sentences, pinned down like so many unpleasant butterflies. “Hi,” he said crisply, like it accompanied a karate chop. That’s the first time we meet Bridget’s husband Martin, and we immediately know what we think of him.

And yet compassion is the deep centre of the book, the primary driver of Kara’s actions. Kara is a caregiver by trade but also by vocation and she’s inevitably drawn to help Bridget. For Bridget, poverty is a foreign country. She doesn’t speak the language of food banks, police, state schools, minimum wage. Kara acts as translator and apologist, guiding her through. As the book unfolds, we also become tourists of these other lives – the suffocating precariousness of the flats and the ludicrous, guiltless gilt of Bridget’s lost life.

Kerr makes gleeful use of signs and portents. Many chapters end by ramping up a sense of foreboding: a rubbish truck sucking refuse into its depths, a foghorn’s clear warning note as Kara stands on a threshold, a bonfire. These haunting little motifs are like short films that leave us hanging, wanting more. What is to be thrown away? What’s the danger in the fog, what will burn? And which are just ghosts of things that will never take place, triggering a shiver in our existential fears? It’s beautifully done.

Kerr has a cinematic ability to capture the familiar, so that when Kara grabs the scratchy blankets off the bed to sit on the fire escape, you can see the exact blankets she means. The atmosphere is of concrete and chain-link and rust, washed-out like the colours in local 80s TV. Kerr makes room for Wellington to be Wellington, so that when Kara steps out onto a deck she notes with approval the fences blocking the wind. Kara can never catch her breath, can never get enough air. When the wind settles, things are benign: The shadows of the washing waved gently on the grass, the relaxed welcome you’d give someone who’d never gone away.

Edited and published by Mary McCallum, who was behind Auē by Becky Manawatu, Kerr’s debut is both sensitive of outlook and deft of expression, feeling nothing like a first novel. There’s little victory to be found at Victory Park flats, but Kerr and her unlikely heroine, are triumphant.

 Reviewed by Ruth Spencer