The Boys in the Island by C J Koch

Book Description

Secondhand. Good condition. Wear to book corners and edges. Light foxing to foredges.

The Boys in the Island is Christopher Koch's first novel. It is a beautiful, lilting coming-of-age story set in Hobart and Melbourne in the 1940s and 50s.

Francis Cullen, growing up on the island of Tasmania, is outwardly a very ordinary boy. But his inner life is dominated by dreams of a place he calls the Otherland: a transfigured world beyond the real one. In childhood, he glimpses it in the landscapes of his native land, and when he falls in love with a country girl, the dream is central to his feeling for her.

After Heather is lost to him, Francis becomes more and more under the influence of Lewie Matthews - a youth whose ambition is to become a criminal. The Otherland's location is now seen as the mainland of Australia, where a mythical life of wildness and crime beckons.

Francis, Lewie and their friends pursue this life in Melbourne until a climax of destruction shatters the dream. (publisher blurb)