The Castoffs

Lou Spanner has spent forty years as a Sydney sports journalist, chasing deadlines and back-page exclusives. Now the game is changing around him - younger editors, shrinking budgets, effectiveness measured by 'clicks', and a redundancy lunch he can see coming a mile off.

When Spanner kills a fox on his pre-dawn drive, the encounter draws him into the orbit of Albert Moss, a fierce and solitary old man who guards a hidden fox colony on Sydney's North Shore. It also leads him to a chaotic under-nine rugby team at a Jesuit school - a squad of castoffs nobody wanted - and to the mystery of a carmine-red pigeon glimpsed above the Harbour Bridge, tied to a tragedy decades old.

Funny, elegiac and deeply humane, The Castoffs is a novel about what gets discarded and what endures when no one is watching. Set against the sandstone canyons and bush-fringed suburbs of Sydney, it is a story about loyalty, ageing and the unexpected places where purpose is found.

Phil Wilkins is one of Australia's most respected sports journalists, whose career spanning five decades covered cricket, rugby and the characters who shaped them. The Castoffs is his first novel.