The Shark Net

“Robert Drew has written a moving and unpretentious memoir of a precocious youth, a bittersweet tribute to youth’s optimism.”—Joyce Carol Oates, The New York Review of Books

 A “spiced and savory memoir” (The New York Times) of the dark life hidden in a sunny seaside Australian community.

Written with the same lyrical intensity and spellbinding prose that has won Robert Drewe’s fiction international acclaim, The Shark Net is set in a city haunted by the menace of an elusive serial killer. Drewe’s middle class youth in the seaside suburbs of Perth, Australia—often described as the most isolated city in the world—takes a sinister turn when a social outcast (who turns out to be an employee of Drewe’s father) embarks on a five-year murder spree. This unusual memoir brilliantly evokes the confluence of adolescent innocence and sexual awakening, while a killer who eventually murders eight people—including several of Drewe’s friends—lurks in the shadows.