In the suburbs of Brisbane, 1975, 12-year-old Andie Tanner lives with her father, her mother and “four quiet souls … downstairs, underneath the house”: her father’s racing greyhounds. Her life is simple and whole, made up of her family, the streets of Morningside, her suburban primary school and the dogs – who Andie adores above all else.

Toni Jordan’s eighth novel, Tenderfoot, opens in a world built around these greyhounds; the kennels, the raised bench used for treatments, the kibble and powders, scales and leads and muzzles and collars. Andie’s parents are gamblers and to them gambling is a “family legacy, an ideology of living”. But they train their dogs meticulously, a way of mastering chance in a game otherwise ruled by it. On the track, the hounds resist the laws of nature; “to them, gravity means nothing. They hover … are streaks of light; they are life, flashing before your eyes”.

For Andie, impatient for her own life to begin, the world is full of waiting and of longing: waiting “for the boxes to open … for the race to begin”; longing for the future in which she can become a greyhound trainer herself. At school, she is clever and polite; a rule-follower. But she soon learns that the rules won’t always keep her safe. When she is shunned by her friends, Andie throws herself into a quest to recover her classmate’s missing cat, Macavity, certain this will win back the affection of her peers. But as she struggles to navigate the labyrinth of childhood friendships, her life at home begins to disintegrate as well.

Told through alternating perspectives of adult narrator and child protagonist, Andie’s story revolves around her relationship with her parents: her beautiful, exhausted, often irritable mother, and her gentle but unreliable father. They are deeply complex characters and Jordan’s portrayal of struggling adults who try their best and yet often fail their serious, overly responsible child is sharp and empathetic. “After your parents are gone,” Andie reflects from the perspective of adulthood, “you realise that inside you and everyone you know … is a child – fallible and wounded, and wrong about so many things”.

Andie tells us that “childhood is as much a place as it is a time” and Jordan renders this place with extraordinary clarity and precision. Her spare, honest prose captures the confusion of being 12: a mixture of earnestness and vulnerability, competence and helplessness. Tenderfoot honours the naivety of its child narrator without softening the world’s edges and I felt a creeping terror for Andie as she is compelled to navigate this world alone. “Maturity does not rise smoothly like water filling a tank”, Jordan writes. “Instead, our coming of age is a jerky, unpredictable process, a wild tide coming in on a ragged beach.”

As she narrates from decades in the future, Andie is both the girl she was – earnest, hopeful, wise beyond her years – and the woman she’s become, bearing the weight of what she’s learned. “When you’re small, the world comes into focus like a polaroid: smudged and indistinct, taking years to resolve into clarity,” Andie reflects. Tenderfoot itself feels like such an image – a snapshot of a girl on the cusp of change, caught between what she knows, what she longs for and what the world delivers instead.

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Jordan is deeply sensitive to social class and community. The racetrack, as Andie’s father insists, is a great leveller: “Rich or poor, teenager or pensioner, new Australian or old, at the dogs, everyone is equal.” But equality is fragile in a world structured by chance. At her first job at the TAB, Andie serves lines of punters “trapped in a prison of their own making”. Betting embodies the paradox of gambling: the dream of freedom is chained to the inevitability of loss. Andie loves this community, the people she’s grown up around. She is one of them. But as the story progresses she begins to see not only what the track promises but also what it costs.

Above all, Tenderfoot grapples with the complexity of human behaviour. “The truth is”, Andie says, “greyhounds are two animals at the same time … the gentlest of animals unless you are a small furry creature. It’s simplistic to think that people are either good or bad. People behave the same way dogs do.” The duality of people, always capable of cruelty and tenderness in equal measure, is what animates Jordan’s novel and what makes Andie’s story so ordinary and so devastatingly recognisable.

With its precise prose and balance of immediacy and hindsight, Tenderfoot has the makings of an Australian classic: a novel about family, loss and the ghosts of who we once were and who we might become.