The devil you know

Leonie Norrington

Damien is horrified when his father, a violent man known to his motorcycling peers as 88, moves back to live with him and his mom 88 is angry. Damien can feel it prickling the air between them. Every muscle in his body is taut, ready to run, planning his escape over the fire between those chairs and straight down to the creek. But he can't run. Not yet. Nothing has happened, yet. He'd just make a fool of himself. Out of the corner of his eye he watches as 88 slowly packs tobacco in a cigarette paper, rolls it into a cylinder, gets up and moves to sit right next to Damien, so close Damien has to clench his teeth and hang onto the chair to stop himself from bolting. Damien can't bear the thought of 88 coming back to live with him and mom; memories of past violence are too strong. But there's glamour in having a father who rides a Harley Davidson, and it leads Damien to run with the in-crowd at school and abandon his real friends. Set in a small-town community in northern Australia, this gripping contemporary tale takes you inside the mind and under the skin of a troubled boy with a vivid imagination who must wrestle with his own violent impulses and minor betrayals.