When we first meet William, he is minutes away from death. He's the main character in Australian writer Marion Halligan's latest novel Goodbye Sweetheart, or rather, his shade is, in this witty and perceptive meditation on the aftermath of loss. William suffers a heart attack and drowns, leaving behind a brother, a wife, two ex-wives, three children and a mistress, and Halligan looks at the impact his sudden and permanent absence has on each of their lives.

Death is a hot topic at the moment in literature but the books we're seeing on the bestseller lists are, for the most part, non-fiction – what one might call mortality memoirs. Though it is fiction, Goodbye Sweetheart is an excellent candidate for entry onto the growing list of required reading for the bereft. Halligan tells it like it is, and tells it well. William's widow Lynette, for example, is not the demure Niobe convention expects and demands. Initially at least, she's something of a virago, a woman who is buffeted by emotion, angry at fate, and angry at William for betraying her by dying.

Halligan has also observed how those left behind often seem to channel the dear departed. William, a well-read man, had an apt quote for every occasion, and Lynette, who is not bookish, suddenly finds herself peppering her speech with quotations. Halligan doesn't spell it out, but we realise this is Lynette's way of keeping her husband alive, and still with her. She and William's mistress, Barbara, finally meet, but this encounter is not the Shootout at the Canberra Corral that one might expect. Lynette's rage has dissipated, and she is in that blessed state of anaesthesia and walling off from the world that can come to those wrung out by emotional trauma. As Halligan aptly puts it, 'She … was feeling remote and calm, sitting in a comfortable small space of grief.' Lynette is civil to Barbara when she calls at the family home.

Everyone is nice and polite in Goodbye Sweetheart, which is perhaps the novel's only flaw. Even among a group of well-mannered middle-class people such as these, someone should have behaved badly. Death brings out the worst in us as well as the best, and by not acknowledging this, Halligan loses the opportunity for a bit of black comic relief.

Barbara's story is the most poignant one in the novel. Her affair with William is part of the house-of-cards existence she has built for herself after her daughter dies in an accident and her marriage ends. The consequences of Barbara's visit to her lover's home are devastating for her: she sees the kind of life that she once had, and will never have again. With her creation of this character, Halligan underlines the fact that no one is as alone as someone with no family – however one defines the concept of a family – and who has no hope of forming one.

What follows is heartbreaking, but in spite of Barbara's fate and a narrative populated with corpses, Goodbye Sweetheart is not a grim read. Anything Halligan writes gives pleasure: she has a lush, sensual style that you want to eat with a spoon, an appropriate response to the work of a novelist who is also an accomplished food writer. Food is just one of the many pleasures of life celebrated here. Whether it's eating fish and chips with a bottle of "heavenly" white wine on the beach, or feeling against one's skin a vintage satin nightgown discovered in a charity shop, or reading a new book by Marion Halligan – these are pleasures that make life worth living.