Twitcher

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Twitcher, Cherise Saywell

Grief, loss and guilt are enormous burdens for a whole family to carry.

Available Formats

  • Trade Paperback
    $32.95 RRP
    ISBN: 9781864711165
    Published: 01/03/2013
    Imprint: Vintage Australia
    Extent: 304 pages
  • EBook
    CHECK RETAILER PRICE
    ISBN: 9781742759067
    Published: 01/03/2013
    Imprint: RHA eBooks Adult
    Extent: 304 pages

Grief, loss and guilt are enormous burdens for a whole family to carry.

A tern will fly to the moon, to live its life in summer … I suppose I'd like to have a little bit of that.

It's boom time in sixteen-year-old Kenno's coastal holiday town. Tourists are buying and building and developing property, and easy money seems to be everywhere. Even birds flock there to nest on the sand and on the cliffs, out to the islands. But for those who live in the holiday town all year round, there is bleakness too, and Kenno's family, haunted by a terrible loss, struggle to get by.

When the family is evicted from their home, Kenno figures they're entitled to a little easy money of their own, and that it's his job to makes things right. Believing it could go a long way to healing them in all their separate ways.

Kenno finds a beautiful house and forms a plan to get the money for it. But the closer he gets to the money, the more complicated things become, and when he involves his sister in his plan, who likes to test the world and goes looking for danger, things move quickly beyond his control …

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"Perhaps the most impressive thing about this book is the way it steadily evokes and elicits strong feeling.Twitcher explores the most specific and private of individual interior states. But the novel is also about society and money: in charting the decline of a family, Saywell explores some of the ways in which the vast divisions between rich and poor are established and maintained. The scene in which the landlord brings a couple and their children to inspect the family's home is quite harrowing, and the delusions behind Kenno's single-minded plan to make money are nothing short of heartbreaking." - Kerryn Goldsworthy, The Sydney Morning Herald