Billarooby
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
After the mysterious death of his grandfather, 11-year-old Lindsay Armstrong and his family leave England for a new life in New South Wales. Property is bought in remote Billarooby, a small settlement on the Lachlan River. It is 1942. The war is far away, but a stranger the boy chases from the farm, turns out to be a young Japanese soldier escaped from a nearby POW camp. His witness of the brutal recapture of the prisoner, triggers the horrific memory of a festering family secret involving both himself and his tyrannical father. The trouble in Billarooby has just begun. Lindsay acquires a picture book about ancient samurai warriors and their Code of Bushido. He comes to believe that the prisoners wish for nothing but to re-join the Emperor and regain their honour, something he feels is lacking in the local world that surrounds him. Lindsay is not the only one obsessed with the prisoners. The district's paranoid fantasies of mass escape are decidedly blacker than Lindsay's imaginings. Racial tensions erupt as the great drought grips and threatens to destroy the once flourishing farm. Vigilantism combined with inability to tackle the truth about the Armstrong family's darkest past, drive Lindsay's parents to desperate measures and bouts of madness. For Lindsay, it's a coming-of-age of great poignancy as the story reaches its climax on the dried-up river bed of the Lachlan.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
A journalist for 25 years in England and America, Anderson brings a masterful prose style to his first novel. The narrative is a remarkable evocation of the author's growing years in Australia during World War II. Lindsay Armstrong, aged 11, relates events generated by his parents, Jack and Lillian, who move the family from England to Billarooby, a remote community in the Outback. Although the reason for emigrating is never mentioned to the boy, Lindsay suspects it was an unspeakable act in his father's past. Jack is crude, a hard drinker, and Lindsay avoids him. He elects as a hero, instead, a Japanese soldier whom he glimpses during the prisoner's brief escape from a nearby camp. Empathy between the boy and the prisoners strengthens as he secretly visits the encampment and sees them brutally treated. Tensions in the community are exacerbated by a devastating drought and by incitements to riot when Jack and fellow racists make Billarooby a war zone. The climax crowns a novel about credible people, not one of them a minor character, as the author presents each with failings as well as qualities that augur hope for a better future. It is a story that will remain in the reader's memory.
