Barracuda
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
From the award-winning author of The Slap comes a powerfully moving story of forgiveness and a young man’s struggle towards maturity.
His whole life, Danny Kelly has wanted just one thing: to win Olympic gold. Everything he’s ever done--every thought, every dream, every action--has taken him closer to that moment of glory, of vindication, when the world would see him for what he is: the fastest, the strongest and the best. His life has been a preparation for that moment.
His parents struggle so that he can attend the most prestigious private school, with the finest swimming program. Danny loathes it there and is bullied and shunned as an outsider, but his coach is the best, and he knows Danny is too--better than all those rich boys, those pretenders. Danny’s win-at-all-costs ferocity gradually wins favour with the coolest boys--he’s Barracuda, he’s the psycho, he’s everything they want to be but don’t have the guts to become. He’s going to show them all.
Should we teach our children to win, or should we teach them to live? How do we make and remake our lives? Can we atone for the past? Can we overcome shame? And what does it mean to be a good person?
A searing and provocative novel by the acclaimed author of international bestseller The Slap, Barracuda is an unflinching look at modern society, at our hopes and dreams, our friendships and our families. It is about class and sport and politics and migration and education. It is about family and friendship and love and work, the identities we inhabit and discard, the means by which we fill the holes at our centre. Barracuda is brutal, tender and blazingly brilliant--everything we have come to expect from this fearless vivisector of our lives and our world.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Tsiolkas (The Slap) tells the story of the pressures of trying to live up to high expectations. Relentlessly bullied at the elite Australian private high school he attends on scholarship, working-class Dan Kelly shows early promise as a swimmer. With the hopes of his parents, coach, and suddenly envious classmates riding on him, Dan becomes fixated on winning at all costs. But when he places fifth at his first international championship race, he breaks down, lashing out violently at his former friends and turns to alcohol for consolation. When a masochistic affair with the wealthy Martin Taylor brings Dan's sexual identity to the fore, he finds himself at the breaking point and comes close to committing murder. He spends some time in prison, and, after his release, he travels to his family's homeland in Glasgow, where he falls in love with the angelic Clyde. But before he can get too involved, he must return to Australia, face his mistakes, and try to reconcile with his struggling family. The novel has all the early signs of a classic failure narrative along the lines of Exley's A Fan's Notes, but it loses direction in its second half. Additionally, the alternating chapters in which the contemporary Dan speaks in the first-person are actually more distant than the more affecting third-person parts. This story never quite realizes its full potential but Tsiolkas's sincerity qualifies it as solidly middleweight.