A large branch falls to the forest floor one morning. Moments later, a woman named Nellika returns to consciousness. “Belly-down, cheek jammed against dirt, trunks horizontal, the track’s edge a disorienting vertical. She had opened her eyes to the world on its side.” The branch struck her across the back, and now she is trapped, in great pain. “How could it be a tree that had done this to her?” she wonders.

This event inaugurates the two timelines of Ilka Tampke’s new novel, How to Love the World. The first is the slow tick of the clock; subheadings record the time as it passes, with the tension of the novel achieved through the slow unfurling of this day. Will Nellika be able somehow to free herself? Will a prince appear? The novel is narrated in a very intimate third person, so there are no hints to the reader whether or not this is a survivor’s tale. I won’t puncture that suspense here.

The second timeline is marked by the repeated subheading “Earlier”, as in, what happened to Nellika before the crash. A terrible argument with her teenage children that morning. Her life before that, as an artist, mother, daughter, partner. “Earlier” is Nellika’s story, told in fragments, and it is not a particularly happy one. A portrait emerges of a child who formed a sense of herself as “difficult”, who was neglected and sometimes humiliated for being “too much”. Nellika comes to understand that her parents passed on their own pain, and she yearns to provide something different – “safety and nourishment” – to her children. But she cannot contain her explosive rage; “like a threatened dog, she attacks”. The narrative keeps alive the possibility of repair. Nellika’s mother and father apologise later in life for the harms they inflicted on their daughter. Nellika’s efforts to mend the relationships damaged by her anger are constant.

Nellika’s daily walks through the forest offered a retreat from this cycle of intergenerational violence, “a perceptible lifting of shame”. As the novel’s long day proceeds, her practice of paying attention to the forest becomes a survival strategy – “She clung to every detail, willing the tree to keep her awake.”

Trapped under the heavy bough, she watches a leaf fall and “felt oddly moved to have witnessed the precise moment of its falling, to observe it in its liminality, when it was sure to die but was not yet dead”. The best writing in the novel conveys the intensity of Nellika’s attention to her surroundings. “Never,” she reflects, “had she looked at one thing for so long.”

Nellika has no ancestral connection to the land on which she might die. This realisation shatters her: “Suddenly the great wound of her placelessness rose up around her, and she felt, in her crushed skeleton and tattered muscle, its agony.” As Nellika reckons with the past it is the forest that brings her back to the present.

I share the broad political commitments of How to Love the World. This is a work of decolonial ecofeminism, an expression of radical immersion in the more-than-human world and its intelligences. I whizzed through the novel the first time I read it, flipping pages when the pace plodded, as it often did. I had to find out whether Nellika survived or not and I wanted to leave the harrowing scenes of family violence behind me.

But this is a novel that clearly asks to be read slowly, with attention to each new inflection of Nellika’s experience. On my subsequent readings, this was how I approached it, but too often the writing lacks the vividness required to reward that attention. We’re in the company of a woman who aspires to report the world fairly, to capture every leaf falling, to recall every angle of every domestic dispute, every remark. Tampke is sparing in her use of figurative language, favouring the kinds of precise descriptions that might appear in a field report. The result is a meticulous catalogue of detail, some of it quite banal. Nellika must sort through it all in real time.

It’s a lot to ask of a reader, to spend several hundred pages with a suffering woman trapped under a log as she tries to figure out her life and hopefully get saved. Nellika’s diligence, her realisations and revisions, her effortfulness overwhelmed and sometimes bored me.

But I talked a great deal about How to Love the World with the people around me as I tried to organise my thoughts about it. This is a sign of a novel that has left a mark. Mainly I talked about how much I wanted to love a novel that is fearless in its efforts to conceptualise a decolonial phenomenology of place, and willing to centre a protagonist who is not only wounded but has inflicted wounds on the people around her.

How to Love the World is heavily laden with a sense of earnest purpose. This purpose and earnestness inhibit the novel’s style, but the questions it asks are no less urgent for that. Through Nellika, Tampke is asking her settler readers to think deeply about what it means to live and die on land to which we have no deep ancestral connection, to relinquish our colonial fantasies of belonging and find a way to love the world as it is.

• How to Love the World by Ilka Tampke is out now through Simon & Schuster