Everything I Knew

Peter Goldsworthy's high-octane, fourteen-year-old narrator Robbie Burns has creative energy to burn . . .

. . . physical and mental, sexual and literary, constructive and destructive. Coming of age in a small town peopled with big characters, he finds his new teacher Miss Peach the most unforgettable of all – his memories of her will haunt him for the rst of his life.

Everything I Knew is at once laugh-out-loud funny and cry-out-loud tragic – farcical, horrifying, confronting – and bursting with originality. It challenges our determination to believe in the innocence of childhood and adolescence, and yet again shows Peter Goldsworthy to be a master of shifting tone. There is no novel quite like it in Australian literature.

'Few of his Australian contemporaries are so skilled at the narrative arts as Goldworthy, let alone so fearless in seeking new, rather than familiar, fictional ground to work.'
Peter Pierce, SYDNEY MORNING HERALD

'Intelligent, complex and deeply affecting.'
Murray Bramwell, ADELAIDE REVIEW

'A bawdy, honest, funny, tragic book about the aspirations of the young and how life happens to them. One of the best novels this year. Simply brilliant.'
Ian Nichols, WEST AUSTRALIAN

Everything I Knew

It's the year 1964, and fourteen-year-old know-it-all Robbie Burns is about to discover he still has a lot to learn.

The world is changing fast, although the news has yet to reach the small South Australian town of Penola. There Robbie leads and idyllic life of rabbiting, backyard science experiments, and hooligan scrapes with his friend Billy. Penola is oblivious even to its minor celebrity as the birthplace of the poet John Shaw Neilson, but poetry means the world to Robbie's new teacher from the city, the stylish Miss Peach, a sixties sophisticate with stirrup pants, Kool cigarettes and Vespa scooter.

Miss Peach's artistic yearnings and modern ways prove too much for the good people of Penola, but they fire Robbie's precocious imagination and burgeoning sexuality, until what begins as a schoolboy fantasy has terrible, real consequences.

Everything I Knew challenges our determination to believe in the innocence of childhood and adolescence. Yet again it shows Peter Goldsworthy to be a master of shifting tone, from the comic to the tragic, and 'one of the few Australian writers to command superb technique' (Sydney Morning Herald)

Readings.com.au: Everything I Knew

Everything I Knew

Everything I Knew