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  • Published: 3 August 2009
  • ISBN: 9781742281919
  • Imprint: Penguin eBooks
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 312

Everything I Knew



Peter Goldsworthy's high-octane, fourteen-year-old narrator Robbie Burns has creative energy to burn.

Physical and mental, sexual and literary, constructive and destructive. Coming of age in a small town peopled with big characters, he finds his new teacher Miss Peach the most unforgettable of all – his memories of her will haunt him for the rest of his life.

Everything I Knew is at once laugh-out-loud funny and cry-out-loud tragic – farcical, horrifying, confronting – and bursting with originality. It challenges our determination to believe in the innocence of childhood and adolescence, and yet again shows Peter Goldsworthy to be a master of shifting tone. There is no novel quite like it in Australian literature.

'Few of his Australian contemporaries are so skilled at the narrative arts as Goldworthy, let alone so fearless in seeking new, rather than familiar, fictional ground to work.' Peter Pierce, Sydney Morning Herald

'Intelligent, complex and deeply affecting.' Murray Bramwell, Adelaide Review

'A bawdy, honest, funny, tragic book about the aspirations of the young and how life happens to them. One of the best novels this year. Simply brilliant.' Ian Nichols, West Australian

  • Published: 3 August 2009
  • ISBN: 9781742281919
  • Imprint: Penguin eBooks
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 312

About the author

Peter Goldsworthy

Peter Goldsworthy grew up in various Australian country towns, finishing his schooling in Darwin. After graduating in medicine from the University of Adelaide in 1974 he worked for several years in alcohol and drug rehabilitation, but since then has divided his working time between general practice and writing. He has won major literary awards across a range of genres: poetry, short story, novels, theatre, and opera libretti.

Goldsworthy's novels have sold over 400 000 copies in Australia alone, and have been translated into European and Asian languages. His novels have three times been shortlisted for the NSW Christina Stead Fiction Prize, and twice for the Miles Franklin Award. Three Dog Night won the 2004 FAW Christina Stead Award, and was longlisted for the Dublin IMPAC prize. In 2003, his first novel, Maestro, was voted by members of the Australian Society of Authors as one of the Top 40 Australian books of all time.

Five of his novels have been adapted for stage and screen. Everything I Knew, published in 2008, was shortlisted for the Prime Minister's Fiction Prize. A collection of short stories, Gravel, was published in 2010.

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