Read our Q&A with Jessica Au about her debut novel Cargo.
Frankie is fifteen and beginning to realise that when it comes to sex, or even love, she doesn’t seem to play it like other girls. As summer begins, she finds herself becoming increasingly attracted to a much older, married man on one of her father’s fishing trawlers, James.
Meanwhile Gillian, also fifteen, is still struggling to come to terms with her damaged body years after a boating accident. She turns too quickly to what she thinks is love and begins a relationship that she is not entirely ready for.
Finally, Jacob, fourteen, has been watching Gillian for weeks. What begins innocently enough soon becomes a fixation which will eventually lead him to discover how little he knows, as well as the full extent of his brother’s bitter, destructive selfishness.
Set in a small coastal town in southern Victoria, Cargo is a sophisticated adult fiction that looks at what it means to be young – that dangerous balance between being both knowing and innocent.
