“Can you draw someone from memory?”

This question repeats through the pages of Melbourne-based author Sophie Overett’s charmingly odd and hypnotic debut novel. It carries meaning both literal and metaphorical: college art teacher Delia Rabbit, reckoning with the recent disappearance of her teenage son Charlie and the past disappearance and death of her sister Bo, takes to painting to remember and preserve them.

The rest of her family is grappling with these losses too: rebellious and angry 20-year-old Olive, who works at a supermarket and has fallen in with a troubling crowd; superhero-obsessed preteen Benjamin, known to his family as Banjo; as well as dying mother Rosemary and estranged partner Ed. They’re each turning to memory to try and make sense of increasingly senseless events. Charlie and Bo loom over the story like ghosts, their presence large and consuming despite their invisibility.

The mystery of The Rabbits unfolds as the family looks for clues regarding Charlie’s whereabouts. Set in Overett’s hometown of Brisbane in the sweltering summer, the oppressive heat is almost a character itself. But what makes the novel surprising, and different, is the magical realism that unexpectedly appears in this otherwise ordinary setting a third of the way in – and largely drives the narrative from that point forward. The result is a whirring, breathless tangle of reality and unreality, forcing the reader to question the truth, then question it again.

In these ways, it recalls Richard Flanagan’s 2020 novel The Living Sea of Waking Dreams, an elegy for nature and life in the face of climate change. Like Flanagan, Overett uses fantasy to reveal something grounded in reality – in this case, the unknowability of the people around us, even those we think we understand most intimately. It’s an ambitious undertaking to interweave literary fiction and magic realism, but Overett executes it beautifully. The fantastical elements are never quite explained, but the plot and characterisation are so convincing and clever that they don’t really need to be.

There’s something deeply, deliciously unsettling about this suburban family drama – how normal these lives seem on the surface, when they are not at all. Even the whimsical names – of the Rabbit family, and some of the people they meet: Delia’s neighbour November; Olive’s frenemy Lux – hint at something beyond this realm. The setting of the novel is modern, yet at moments it feels like a different time and place altogether – it’s strange to read references to TikTok alongside these bizarre happenings. This sense of disorientation is a large part of what makes the novel so compelling.

Overett excels at creating complex, three-dimensional characters that can be both sympathetic and loathsome. In Delia, she challenges the notion of an ideal mother – what we see instead is a woman at odds with the many expectations forced upon her, who is caring and selfish in equal measure. In the spiky, difficult Olive, she encapsulates the liminal space between adolescence and adulthood with a character who is struggling to find out who she is and takes it out on her family, despite loving them. And in the child characters – Banjo and his school friend Poppy – she shows the world through innocent eyes, ever more perceptive than the adults around them. The secondary characters and side-plot romances – Delia with a handsome young student; Olive with a dreamy colleague who works at the deli – further reveal deceptions, secrets and surprises within the structures of family and institutions.

While the writing style is lovely and evocative, Overett does lean on a couple of phrases too frequently – characters often “hum”, do things “not unkindly”. But it’s a small gripe with a novel that’s otherwise immensely captivating and original, culminating not in complete resolution for the characters, but in unconditional acceptance and love between them.

“Nothing’s just one thing,” Banjo muses close to the end of the novel. The Rabbits can be summed up exactly so – it’s a truly unique work that prises open the faultlines in a family to reveal the inexplicable, sublime magic pulsing beneath.

• The Rabbits by Sophie Overett is out now through Penguin Random House