'Set in Melbourne in the 1950s, a 11-year-old boy witnesses a murder when he is spying through a window of a strange house.
'In the following weeks he comes to map out all the significant adventures he has in the labyrinthine city, trying to make sure he doesn't cross the path of the murderer, who he believes wishes to silence and dispose of him. Comics and superheroes inform his strategies for avoiding the bogeyman, as does the memory of his twin brother, Tom, who recently died in a tragic accident.' (From the publisher's website.)
Epigraph:
We look at the world once, in childhood.
The rest is memory.
Louise Gluck, 'Nostos'
The Torch
Sydney
:
HarperCollins Australia
,
2015
8046044
2015
single work
novel
crime
'The sequel to the much-loved novel, The Cartographer. Picking straight up where The Cartographer left off, we learn that the Blayneys' house has burnt down, and the person suspected of arson is their erstwhile house guest, young Keith Kavanagh. Young Keith, who the kid calls Flame Boy, has also, not coincidentally, gone missing, thus setting our narrator is on a mission to find him and save him. But while he's trying to save Flame Boy - also known as The Torch - he's also on the lookout for a buried suitcase of secrets; having to simultaneously manage a new gang of boys that he's formed, not to mention a new girlfriend who alarmingly, likes kissing - a lot; avoid Keith's dangerous prison-escapee father, Fergus Kavanagh, also an arsonist, who is suspected of having sold secrets to the Russians; and most importantly make sure his mother doesn't know what he's up to. It's all madcap, slightly shambolic and irresistably fun.' (Publication summary)
