The Shark Net
Author:
Robert Drewe
ISBN:
9780670868193
Hard cover with dust jacket, 358 pp. Childhood memoir by an award-winning Australian novelist. In the 1950s, Robert Drewe, aged six, moved with his family from Melbourne to Perth, the isolated, innocent capital of Western Australia. Then a man Drewe knew murdered a boy he also knew. The murderer randomly killed eight strangers - variously shooting, strangling, stabbing, bludgeoning and hacking his victims, and running them down with cars - and an innocent Perth was changed forever. Drewe writes that 'The murders and their aftermath have both intrigued me and weighed heavily on me for three decades. To try and make sense of this time and place, and of my own childhood and adolescence, I had, finally, to write about it.' The book received the 2000 Brisbane 'Courier-Mail' Book of the Year Award, the 2000 Western Australian Premier's Non-fiction Book Award and the 2001 Vision Australian Braille Book of the Year Award. The book has also been adapted for television.
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