The Mindless Ferocity Of Sharks: A Novel

Eleven year-old Floaty-boy (so named because of his passion for body-surfing and peculiar talent for buoyancy) inhabits a murky, watery world of wagging school and illicit night surfing. He hovers on the edge of things; he is in between ? not boy or man ? and inhabits liminal spaces: the edge of the ocean when he body-surfs and the edges of a family that seems to be spinning out of control. Vulnerable, Floaty-boy is as prey to his altered dream-like perceptions of the world as he is to the sharks that cruise in the other world of down below. At the centre of Floaty-boy's universe is Adelaide - mother, wife, surfer and breadwinner ? who holds not only her own family together but the knockabout Cronies of her larrikin husband, the Old Man. Yet when her eldest son, Eddie, disappears, her family's world threatens to fall apart; her centre may not hold and Floaty-boy has to find a way to cope.