Shark Net

Robert Drewe, whose literary stature in Australia is comparable to Richard Ford or Cormac McCarthy, is already capturing a wider world with work the Sunday Times of London calls "spellbinding" & the Independent "cinematically immediate, crackling with an intensity of sense." In The Shark Net, his first major work of non-fiction, he uses his lyrical sensibility to combine a deeply disturbing chronicle of multiple murder with a starkly intimate picture of his own adolescence. Perth has been called the most isolated city in the world, but Drewe's family lived in what was thought a comfortable, tidy little suburb on the "good" side of the Swan river. Appearances were deceiving. Across the river, living rather differently, was Eric Cooke, a man with a hare lip, seven children, & a habit of slipping over the river at night to murder whom he chose--including a friend of Drewe's. Drewe recreates the eerie unreality of a community held in terror for five years & events that marked him for life. This picture of the dark life hidden in the blandest of suburbs will resonate in America today as much as, or more than, anywhere in the world.Drewe, Robert is the author of 'Shark Net' with ISBN 9780670888092 and ISBN 0670888095.