After an unfortunate stretch in the ‘big gym’, Jim Bloke – Aussie, thinker, dreamer – wants to settle into coastal life and turn his self-taught smarts and thoughts to the things he’s come to love: good books, fine cookery, the bush, the sea.

Growing up an orphan, he’s a bit adrift and disconnected from other folk, but when he lands a comfortably paid job as a sea-urchin diver and falls for his beautiful deckhand things seem too good to be true. They are: the undercurrents of the fishing industry are not far from Underbelly, and distracted by love and not as clued-in as he’d like to think, Jim makes the perfect fall guy when things go bad. But, in running again, Jim begins to discover who his real family are and who he might be, with a little help from the true locals and someone who finally loves him.

Bloke is full of deftly drawn characters, from the comic and sinister to the magical, populating an evocative Gippsland setting, and the novel’s shifting moods and odd socio-political punch grabbed me to the final page.