Jesse Ball's older brother Abram died in 1998, aged 24.
He had Down syndrome and the author says in the foreword he wrote Census to help people see what it is like to love someone with the condition.
The story, though, puts a dying father taking his son (who has Down syndrome) on the road to survey the population.
His wife has died earlier and the trip to take the census gives man and son a sense of purpose, binds them together in a common quest.
I hate to use the P word, but at times, early on, it all felt a little pretentious.
Ball, a poet too, has a lyrical style and loves to talk his way around an issue, tangle himself in knots and then magically unravel himself by the end of the chapter.
He is a fan of punctuation and it feels at first as though he is being deliberately obtuse. But as the duo go from town to town - each place taking a letter of the alphabet - the clouds begin to part.
There are beautiful nuggets where Ball seems to arrive at some universal truth. Often the narrator comes to these epiphanies with the help of his son's point of view, which often opposes his own.
"Out in the world I have come to see that he who looks too hard for any particular thing, though he may find it, will certainly miss the most wondrous and strange things he passes, though they may stare him in the face."
As the novel progresses, it is increasingly tempting to return to passages and re-read them.
"In a sense, it is possible to feel what wild-horsemen must have felt, riding down upon cities in the dim past: the desire to simply burn these mediocre places and pile the skulls, it rises in the breast when one beholds a paltry place. There is a dream that the place you await does in fact lie in wait for you. This is the dream of being a traveller."
Ball has a way of slowly reeling you in.
The father begins his census duties asking people the conventional questions
but as his health deteriorates, he changes his methodology. He asks people what he wants and records what he believes is "important".
There is humour and there are poignant realisations without ever straying into melodrama.
Part epic poem, part family history; Ball has crafted something unique and enduring.
Rob Kidd is an ODT court reporter and books editor.
