Hawker Kingsley

Tyson Crescent is home to forty-two year old Hawker Kingsley, a kitten-breeding ex-con who is done with friendship, sick of love and tired of humans in general. Avoided and feared by his neighbours, he becomes an object of fascination to Elsie Ashberg, the teenage wannabe-writer who lives next door. Carrying through with a dare, Elsie knocks on Hawker’s door. A volatile and unlikely friendship is born.

In the throes of adolescence, Elsie is growing suspicious of all her untested assumptions. She is tired of the phoniness of her teachers, the hypocrisy of her former hippy parents and the pettiness of the people around her. Hawker’s apparent rejection of the entire social world seems a panacea to her increasing cynicism. Her pursuit of the mysterious loner takes her into foreign and threatening psychological terrain in
which the safety of her suburban, middle-class childhood will be lost forever.

Hawker Kingsley is a tale about growing up, about the unpredictable, socially impervious nature of desire, and asks the question: can people ever truly be selfless?