Past the Shallows by Favel Parrett

JUDGES' COMMENTS

In this lyrical, moving and wonderfully evocative novel set on Tasmania's remote south coast, Favel Parrett does a very difficult thing superbly well: tells a story through the eyes, and in the voices, of young children. Ten-year-old Harry and his four years older brother Miles, their mother dead, live with their disappointed and bitter father, an abalone fisherman. Harry and Miles are children forced to grow up before their time, with heartbreaking consequences.

In Past the Shallows, Favel Parrett superbly renders in unsentimental language the implosion of a dysfunctional family, and the desperation of powerless children to make things right. In Harry she has created one of the most memorable child characters in Australian fiction, a beautiful boy readers will want to reach into the novel and rescue.