'There are many books that kindle nostalgia for the pleasures of childhood, but there is also the rare book that does the same for its calamities. Tony Birch’s Ghost River is a novel that paints young lives, then dangles them perilously close to booze, neglect, corrupt police, a Greek gangster, and the silt- and body-clogged river that runs through their backyards. The pages are lean and read quickly, like some cinematic current or the fleeting attention spans of the young, and though you do not have to be young or old or even Australian to enjoy the meanders of Birch’s plot, you must have immense reserves of your own imagination to endure its drying up in the final stretches of the book. Luckily for Birch, Ghost River builds enough momentum through its little protagonists’ immense charms to leave readers focused on them and not the lulls in narrative weight. ' (Introduction)
