Neil Cronk, precocious thespian and Sutherland Shire native, has graduated from high school and outgrown the cloistered community of Sydney’s southern beaches. Spurning the devoted Gordon, teenage soulmate Courtney and the brutish and drug-addled Stuart, Neil relocates to London via Bathurst, insulating himself from his past while gliding into theatrical success and sexual debauchery. An act of violence forces Neil to confront the cost of his self-absorption, as he returns home to contend with drug addiction, suicide and the impending marriage of his first love.

Brendan Cowell’s literary debut relies heavily on autobiography – like Cronk, the star of Love My Way and Beneath Hill 60 was raised in Cronulla and studied theatre at Charles Sturt University before a sojourn in London. While insisting that any similarities between himself and his troubled protagonist are exclusively geographical, Cowell has provided an engaging recollection of youth in the country’s early 1990s, chronicling the songs and the recreational drugs of the era with precision and a contagious, yet melancholy, nostalgia. His treatment of youth unemployment and suicide, an almost forgotten yet ubiquitous feature of Australia’s last period of economic austerity, is forceful without being didactic, and his portrait of Cronulla, a place that has become an unfortunate byword for xenophobia, acknowledges its nativist outlook while still evoking sympathy for the suburb’s intense communal instincts and natural beauty.

The portrayal of the protagonist’s fleeting encounters with his aloof father sets the tone for Neil’s strained friendships and the emotional immaturity of the male characters. There are times where Cowell appears on the cusp of probing the minds of other men in the story, only to use Neil’s egotism to absolve himself of the responsibility, but this does not hamper a remarkably absorbing first novel.