There is so much hope in Eva’s initial encounters with Pat. Tentative smiles and introductions, hand-holding in the back of the Uber on the way to her place. They save their first kiss for the moment they land in bed, and have deep conversations after.

But just a few weeks later, Eva is pregnant and Pat is dead, never having known that she is carrying his child.

It’s the little bursts of good in what could be described as a modern-millennial tragedy that makes Allee Richards’ debut novel, Small Joys of Real Life, the poignant work that it is.

Shortlisted for the Richell prize for emerging writers and the Victorian premier’s award for an unpublished manuscript, the novel charts the monthly happenings in Eva’s life (and by extension, that of her friends, Annie and Sarah) over the course of her pregnancy. In between, there are heartfelt conversations she will never have with the father of her baby: intimate revelations of how buoyed she felt in the aftermath of their one-night-stand; a dwelling on what could have been; an indulgence in the fantasy that she could have stopped him from taking his own life.

It’s another narrative predicated on the sense of millennial hopelessness and angst made famous by the likes of Sally Rooney (Normal People), Anna Hope (Expectation), Dolly Alderton (Ghosts) and Frances Macken (You Have to Make Your Own Fun Around Here), but with a quintessential Melburnian feel. Like the women in the aforementioned stories, Eva and her friends don’t have huge problems, they’re just grappling with the same sort of pensiveness that seems embedded in the psyche of anyone born after 1983.

If Richards knows why this is the case, she doesn’t let on. We spend a lot of time dissecting things in Eva’s head, observing the well-constructed characters around her whose stories are told intimately, but don’t distract from the main plot.

She writes matter-of-factly – never preaching – about bringing kids into a world battling climate change; about the gentrification of Melbourne’s once culturally-diverse suburbs. There’s an implicit, perhaps unconscious, resentment for the novel’s boomer couples; the effortless way in which they know one another’s needs, their ownership of seaside holiday homes, complete with thriving gardens bearing bountiful fruit, the fact that they seem to be able to just get on with life while the generations after them constantly falter.

Though clever and subtle in its appraisal of modern life and dating, romantic relationships take a backseat to strong but flawed female friendships. Richards deftly navigates the intricacies of close-knit groups: the unspoken judgments; the push-pull we feel when our friends’ lives seem better, or simpler, than our own; the annoyance at opportunities landing in laps. Perhaps most commendable is her depiction of female desire; historically under-represented in general, but basically never represented in pregnant characters. Richards doesn’t shy away from Eva’s questionable choices in the pursuit of sex, nor does she sanitise or glamourise pregnancy (if anything, Eva seems to experience every single symptom you could possibly read about in a pregnancy book).

It’s a by-product of escapism from Eva’s very palpable loneliness perhaps, though Richards doesn’t render her a hopeless victim. Instead, her story is one of underlying optimism, most obvious when she counts the things she would like to experience with her baby, like walks in the pram or the making play-dough. Simple moments, Eva calls them, while also lamenting that the space adults make for sharing such joys – because they’re not as big as career prospects or romantic relationships – is limited.

“We never talk about them,” she says, of things like a pleasing turn of phrase in the book she’s reading, the home-grown eggplant left on her doorstep by a new neighbour, her baby’s kicks when she’s lonely.

Small Joys of Real Life is an easy, pleasurable read with surprising depth. There is doom in this life, more than we possibly realise, but there is also promise and hope; not just in new life that grows within us, but in our little moments of living, breathing joy even as we stare down the barrel of certain, unpredictable death.

• Small Joys of Real Life by Allee Richards is out now through Hachette