Penguin Books Australia

Abel Jackson has lived by the sea at Longboat Bay ever since he could remember. He helps his mother each day and loves to dive. One day he meets Blueback, the biggest and most beautiful fish he's ever seen.

When Abel's mother is approached by developers she decides she must do something to protect their fragile piece of coastline, But can Abel and his mother save Blueback and Longboat Bay in time?...

Abel Jackson's boyhood belongs to a vanishing world.  On an idyllic stretch of coast whose waters teem with fish, he lives a simple, tough existence.  It's just him and his mother in the house at Longboat Bay, but Abel has friends in the sea, particularly the magnificent old groper he meets when diving. As the years pass, things change, but one thing seems to remain constant: the greed of...

THE NUMBER ONE BESTSELLER - Winner of  the Miles Franklin Literary Award 2009

When paramedic Bruce Pike is called out to deal with another teenage adventure gone wrong, he knows better than his partner - better than the parents - what happened and how. Thirty years before, that dead boy could have been him.

Winner of the Miles Franklin Literary Award 2009

More than once since then I've wondered whether the life-threatening high jinks that Loonie and I and Sando and Eva got up to in the years of my adolescence were anything more than a rebellion against the monotony of drawing breath.

Breath is a story about the wildness of youth - the lust for excitement and terror, the determination to be extraordinary...