Twenty years after the publication of The Arrival – the wordless graphic novel that won several literary awards – writer and illustrator Shaun Tan has penned another career-defining masterpiece. Taking nearly a decade to complete, Hometown is a triumph in visual storytelling and fable, presented in Tan’s confident and controlled voice and style.

Where The Arrival explored the complexities of migration and belonging in a mystifying new place, Hometown ponders the question: what if you really came from somewhere else? The new graphic novel is not a follow-up to The Arrival, but a dexterous continuation of Tan’s fascination with and talent for creating strange-yet-familiar worlds, and how his characters belong within them.

Hometown follows a nameless girl who is the only human-looking inhabitant of a distant world that is full of creatures big and small and of customs unrecognisable to outsiders. To readers of Tan’s works though, these creatures are recognisable – a playful diversity of shapes, curves and angles, all with different eyes and ways of sensing the world.

The world he has created is both large and small, detailed and vast, grounded in community and love, or floating away entirely. Told in panels, full pages and sometimes wordless double-page spreads (and, at the story’s height, a lush gatefold), Tan gives this world his full application.

Aside from the nameless girl, nothing else about this world is human – except in the ways that everyone there belongs together, bonded by loving as an inherent way of living. The girl lives with her family, none of whom look like her, but they also don’t particularly resemble one another, either. Her little sister fits within the girl’s hand, while her big sister never fits on a page.

Life is ordinary for the girl – going to school, working on her totem and contributing to her family’s work – until something giant and unexpected comes from a big hole in the sky. This looming great creature seems like an enormous astronaut, but it is a fancy suit containing a smaller visitor. This visitor – a human – is here to find the girl and convince her she doesn’t really belong here. She is from his world, where everyone looks like both of them, and no one knows how she ended up here.

“We belong together,” he says, which feels like a sinister truth and a lie between strangers, not at all romantic. While the girl tries to welcome the visitor into her world and its traditions, he stays closed-minded. “Being like me, I thought the boy would understand and love everything the same way I did,” the girl says.

Tan is sparse with words, placing the vivid imagery as the focus of the fable. The girl’s voice is prominent, sharing her story directly with the reader, recounting her contemplation over whether to stay in her home town or to leave, as well as her ultimate deceit. She is humorous, judgmental, defensive and confused in the face of confronting evidence.

In all its warm, dusty and starry illustrations, Hometown asks the reader to consider – and even outright reject – the message that others have the right to tell us where we belong, showing how violent and unwelcome this act can be. Despite being otherworldly, it is a text that prompts conversation around identity, home, displacement, otherness, choice, acceptance, prejudice and perhaps even harm, without being heavy-handed. As a fable that’s made for reading with children, Hometown is also a celebration of the strangeness of love, family, community and tradition.

The beauty of this book is in the details of Tan’s watercolour, coloured pencil and ink pens on paper – a rare treat in a publishing world that favours the efficiency of digital art. With clear influence from 19th century illustration and visual art, Tan’s world is detailed in the fine lines of sand, clouds and palms, grasping for understanding and never quite meeting each other, despite being hand in hand.

• Hometown by Shaun Tan is out now (Allen & Unwin; $35)