Jerra and his best mate Sean set off in a beaten-up old VW to go camping on the coast. Jerra’s friends and family want to know when he will finish university, when he will find a girl. But they don’t understand about Sean’s mother Jewel, or the bush or the fish with the pearl. They think he needs a job but what Jerra is searching for is more elusive. Only the sea, and perhaps the old man who lives in a shack beside it, can help. Winton’s debut novel is a haunting and powerful meditation on the horrors and joys of adulthood, and the conflict between ideals and reality.