With their father, there's always a catch ...Colt Jenson and his younger brother Bastian have moved to a new, working-class suburb. The Jensons are different. Their father, Rex, showers them with gifts - toys, bikes, all that glitters most - and makes them the envy of the neighbourhood. To Freya Kiley and the other local kids, the Jensons are a family from a magazine, and Rex a hero - successful, attentive, attractive, always there to lend a hand. But to Colt he's an impossible figure in a different way: unbearable, suffocating. Has Colt got Rex wrong, or has he seen something in his father that will destroy their fragile new lives? Sonya Hartnett's new novel for adults is an unflinching and utterly compelling work from one Australia's finest writers. 'Golden Boys has a line-by line brilliance that is startling ...[Hartnett] is one of Austtralia's most penetrating analysts of the travail and turmoil of families, especially as witnessed and suffered by the young.' Weekend Australian 'Sonya Hartnett is that rarest and most precious of writers: a reverse Peter Pan.' Saturday Paper 'A web in which it is a pleasure to become entangled.' Saturday Paper 'Succinct and vivid.' The Age 'A fine portrait of the charming predator.' West Australian 'An absorbing, fiercely elegant and tangibly believable novel that raises questions about our responsibility to bear witness - and details thecomplex obstacles to doing so.' Australian Book Review
- ISBN:
- 9781926428611
- 9781926428611
- Category:
- Contemporary fiction
- Publication Date:
- 27-08-2014
- Publisher:
- PENGUIN BOOKS AUSTRALIA
- Country of origin:
- Australia
- Pages:
- 256
- Dimensions (mm):
- 235x154x21mm
- Weight:
- 0.39kg
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Reviews
2 Reviews
Unlike many who discovered her young adult books as a teenager, this was my first exposure to Sonya Hartnett. I was not disappointed. Sonya's characters, both children and adults, are convincingly complex, and at times the atmosphere feels like the literary equivalent of the music from Jaws. Well done.
There is something creepy and unsettling about this book. It grips you from the first chapter and builds and builds as Sonya has built a reputation in writing so well. Based in a sprawling Australian family street over summer when a new slightly more affluent family, The Jensons, move in. The father of this new family takes an interest in his kids’ lives and their friends. He is very generous and makes them the envy of the neighbourhood. Everything looks too good to be true and yet the reader feels so very unsettled. Sonya is brilliant at pacing and ‘the build’. I really recommend this one.
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