Ellis Gunn's memoir deals with a disconcertingly strange but intense form of attraction. She was stalked by a person known here only as "The Man", despite having repeatedly rebuffed his approaches and rejected his offers of a relationship (of sorts). Gunn is a Scottish poet, transplanted to Adelaide in 2010. The punch and pace in her story reflect her doggedly matter-of-fact way of approaching intimate, awkward and frightening issues: "I've questioned my motives and my sanity a thousand times." Gunn's record is based on her personal experience, with a few of the usual caveats introduced. Pseudonyms have been used, some events condensed, and passages of dialogue re-constructed. Her chronicle has little in common with the sort of stalking by paparazzi that Princess Diana notoriously endured. Nor does it have the lethal edge of, say, the recent Pelosi house invasion, or David Chapman's obsession with John Lennon. All those victims were celebrities, ensnared and tormented but with much of their private lives unavoidably in the public domain. Ellis Gunn does not fit that profile at all. At the time of the incidents, she was a bike-riding, poetry-writing mother taking her kid to school. Nonetheless, Gunn was deeply scarred by the stalking. She maintains that she was "like a cartoon roadrunner", "exhausted, mentally and physically". Even after a first, brief encounter, Gunn felt "tiny stones of panic rattle inside my rib cage". Her book, which includes a lot of Gunn's back-story in Scotland and Australia, is another affirmation of the importance of not just putting up with stuff, not suffering in silence, not making excuses for unacceptable behaviour. Gunn writes eloquently about being afraid to be alone, being obliged to alter her routines, and living with a besetting feeling of anxiety, hyper-alertness and worry. She moves on, a bit less effectively, from her own story to wider commentary on patriarchy and misogyny. For others who might be plagued by stalkers, Gunn offers lots of advice, but especially sets of useful lists. One outlines a taxonomy of stalkers. Another goes through different ways of responding to threats. The value of "instinctive warning signals" is emphasised; Gunn gives some credence to taking heed when the hairs on the back of your neck begin to bristle. Instinct seems a more reliable guide than relying on polite brush-offs or under-estimating the threat posed. Gunn's stalker had no criminal record and committed no offence against the law. That made curtailing his activities or fencing him off all the more difficult. That said, Gunn does give credit to both the police and to Victim Support for explaining to her both their and her options.