‘Who wants to be the same as everyone else? You don’t want to be ordinary, do you?’
Melbourne, 1986 Tom always imagined he was adopted. At seventeen, he flees ordinariness in small-town Australia for the city and a run-down block named Cairo. There he meets Max Cheever. Enigmatic, artistic, anarchic: he liberates Tom from the bourgeois aspiration of university and draws him into his circle of dropouts and dreamers. Through the haze of parties and politics, Tom glimpses a darker side to their vie bohème. Falling under Max’s spell – and in love with his wife – he is offered an extraordinary chance: to join them in the greatest art heist of the twentieth century. Among art dealers, thieves and forgers, Tom trusts only in Max. This is his family now.
But of all this summer’s lessons, the cruellest will be telling what is real from what is fake.
In a rush of first love, risk and a search for belonging, Chris Womersley’s third novel paints a two-faced portrait of friendship and betrayal. His instinctive characterization and fine-wire tension take us to a point of brilliant, heady uncertainty – that first blind step towards adulthood.