Penguin Books Australia

'I always been a coin boy . . .'

Hokitika, 1865, at the height of the Gold Rush. In a town with a hundred pubs, young Halfie – aka Harvey, Thumbsucker, Bedwetter, Cocoa and Pipsqueak – gets by as best he can.

Most of the time he hangs around the Bathsheba pub, washing dishes, running errands and making the odd coin – and observing from close quarters the parade of miners...

'I always been a coin boy . . .'

Hokitika, 1865, at the height of the Gold Rush. In a town with a hundred pubs, young Halfie – aka Harvey, Thumbsucker, Bedwetter, Cocoa and Pipsqueak – gets by as best he can.

Most of the time he hangs around the Bathsheba pub, washing dishes, running errands and making the odd coin – and observing from close quarters the parade of miners...

This brilliant, compelling and unusual novel – part mystery, part philosophy and part social history – is set in the early years of the 19th century. The narrator is an inmate in Bedlam, the London mental asylum, where he is chained to a wall in unspeakably disgusting conditions. Yet he is witty, urbane and seemingly sane – he philosophises on freedom, on love and love lost, and on...