My father trained me to silence the way he trained his dogs, with food and a cane. Speech, he said, was poison. It scared the game, alerted the gamekeepers and betrayed your friends and family. Tom Clay was a poacher back in Suffolk. He was twelve when he was caught, tried and transported to New South Wales. Now, assigned to a shepherds’ hut out west, he is a boy among violent men. He keeps his … violent men. He keeps his counsel and watches over his sheep; he steers clear of blowhards like the new man, Rowdy Cavanagh. He is alert to danger, knowing he is a foreigner here: that the land resists his understanding.
The question is: how fast can he learn?
Because a vicious killer named Dan Carver is coming for Tom and Rowdy. And if Tom can’t outwit Carver in the bush – and convince Rowdy to keep his stupid mouth shut – their deaths will be swift and cruel.
This riveting, fast-paced new novel from the multi-award-winning Catherine Jinks brings the brutality and courage of Australia’s colonial frontier vividly to life – and sees one of our master storytellers at the peak of her powers.
Catherine Jinks’ books for adults, young adults and children have been published in a dozen countries and have won numerous awards, including a Victorian Premier’s Literary Award and the CBCA Book of the Year Award (four times). She lives in the Blue Mountains.
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I received a free electronic copy of this excellent historical novel on November 15, 2019, from Netgalley, Catherine Jinks, and Text Publishing. Thank you all for sharing your hard work with me. I have read this novel of my own volition, and this review reflects my personal, honest opinion of this work. I am pleased to recommend Catherine Jinks as an author to follow to friends and family.
We are in New South Wales in the 1840s with a young Englishman, a shepherd named Tom Clay and a couple of his dogs, Gyp, a black and white Scotch collie, and Pedlar, a yellow mongrel. Tom considers these dogs all the family he has left. NSW is pretty bleak and wild – Tom and his fellow shepherds are hired to protect their flock of sheep from native Blacks, wild dogs, and blackguards. He has a couple of people he can actually depend on in NSW – Mr. Barrett, owner of the land, the flock, and the shepherd’s hut they sleep in when it’s not their turn sleeping in the watch-box. Fellow shepherd Joe Humble seems to be an honorable man. Tom also trusts Rowdy, a fairly new addition to the group of shepherds of Mr. Barrett sheep. Except for the periodic deliveries of a cartload of supplies, the shepherds stay in the brush with their flock which they protect and move as the grass becomes grazed down.
In the 1840s a lot of the residents of NSW were prisoners shipped out of England. Caught poaching in his early teens, Tom was a boy who lost his mother in his youth, son of a hanged poacher, brother of a shot poacher. Many of the prisoners sent out to Australia and New South Wales were very much more of a threat than a teenaged poacher. And many of them have fallen through the cracks and are now a threat to all the honest settlers of these South Pacific Island nations. Tom is learning to recognize them. That may save his life. And a lesson learned the hard way – only animals are completely trustworthy. They also only have one life to give… Not good odds for Tom’s survival.
I was given this ARC by Netgalley in exchange for a fair and honest review.
Thirteen year old Tom Clay has been sentenced to life on the Australian frontier, shepherding sheep, for the crime of poaching. He is the youngest out there and doesn’t fit in. His father had told him over and over again how dangerous it is to talk, to keep quiet so as not to get caught. Tom knows that it’s best to go unnoticed.
There is a fellow camp mate who has committed many gruesome crimes, a violent man by the name of Carver. He’s already murdered two of the other shepherds. Now he’s killed Joe, set fire to the hut, and hunting Tom and another camp-mate, Rowdy. They make their way back to their boss’s farm only to find that Carver has already murdered everyone there. Will they both survive or will they both perish?
This book was a page turner. With Tom being so young and in so much danger, I found that I couldn’t put the book down until I finished it. There are many twists and turns, surprises that I didn’t see coming. I absolutely loved the end!