'an outstanding piece of writing...a powerful novel...' Reading Time

Friendship is a slippery notion. We lose friends as we change and our friends don't, or as we form other alliances, or as we betray our friends or are ourselves betrayed...

Set against the backdrop of World War II, four teens growing up in the pearling town of Broome form a deep friendship that will change their lives forever.

Hartley and Alice Penrose are the children of a pearling master. Mitsy Sennosuke is the daughter of a Japanese diver. Jamie and his family have just moved to town. Together, they unconsciously cross the boundaries of class and race, as they swim, joke and watch films in the tin cinema on Sheba Lane. Soon, two of them will fall in love.

But these happy, untroubled times end when lives are lost in a terrible cyclone, and townsfolk turn against the Sennosukes. When Japanese bombs begin to fall in northern Australia, loyalties are divided and friendships take on an altogether different form...

In this beautifully written novel, Garry Disher evokes a war-devastated Australia and its effects on young adults forced to leave their childhood behind.