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A series of vignettes from amid the Australian lower orders, these tales appear as something of a faux-autobiography, and plain realism is their greatest strength. Michael Byrne is a child in Fitzroy, a working-class suburb of Melbourne. His parents are young, poorly educated manual workers in a 1960s Australia which is going through social upheaval. One aspect of these changes is the removal of city squalor in exchange for government housing. The family's new abode is half-way into the boondocks and young Michael resents this and suffers as a result. His mother is resilient and long-suffering, his father a violent, unreasonable drunk. So it is a familiar type of Angela's Ashes-esque "memoir". Tony Birch's Antipodean setting gives fresh lustre to a familiar genre, while his style is so straightforward that it is almost under-embellished.
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