 |
Robert Drewe's memoir The Shark Net is a book about Perth by a young Victorian who moved to the West with his family in the era after World War II. When he returns in the early 1960s, as a young journalist recruited by The Age, he has been marked forever by the experience of living in a city haunted by the actions of a serial killer. It is superb coming-of-age writing, and since so much of Drewe's tale is set against the backdrop of the beaches of Perth and Rottnest Island, it makes an atmospheric summer read.
And if it gives you a taste for Drewe's writing, try Our Sunshine, which for me remains the best of many fictional retellings of the Ned Kelly story.
Neither of these books is newly published, but that, too, is part of the summer reading experience, at least for me and, I suspect, many other people, too. It is a time when you can savour the things you like in life, and that includes returning to books you already know. If they're any good -- and both these books by Drewe are very good - you will find they improve with age.
|
