No, I’m not heading off there soon. Against all my normal instincts – i.e untried Australian author, no interest in the country itself, awful front cover, a stack of dialogue, I bought this and read it in a week, finishing tonight. I heard the writer on the radio – he’d won a Walkely Award for god’s sake. It was somehow irresistable. He talked about bonds between old schoolfriends, twenty years later, based on nothing but old memories. He talked about men wanting to fit in with or even compete with other men for status, money, sexual prowess. It just struck me as interesting. 
And the book was pretty interesting mostly. I never knew where it was going to go to next. The all-out bad guys were established early on, but no-one was good, they all had their secrets and their jealousies. And loathings. Unless I read it with not enough care, it didn’t seem to me to really resolve to anything. Baddies got some come-uppance. What looked like an awful tragedy about to happen was averted. Amazingly a relationship guaranteed to splinter into oblivion seemed to settle and show a light towards future changes. And pretty much the only revelation I noted was that the main character realised his dad was a prick. I like a novel where it’s not cut and dried, where nothing is super obvious, but with an ending like that, I’ve no idea how to rate it. Because it kept me page turning with uncommon urgency it rates a 4 stars.