Boy Overboard
Published on 15. August 2014
264 pages
978-1-77553-200-2 (ISBN)
Description
An achingly insightful coming-of-age novel about discovering sexuality and selfhood.
Hungry Creek runs out over mudflats and curves around to a tidal beach. Hungry Creek is where everything is put that nobody wants: a dump, a zoo, a loony bin. It is also a magical place.
'I'm two bits of mismatched bikini. M doesn't seem to belong to E . . .'
Jamie is eleven, on the threshold of discovery. But he can't find the map that will explain where he fits in or who he is. His parents are away and he is staying with family friends. The sea is rising towards high tide, and he is a boy overboard.
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Person
Peter Wells is a writer and film-maker. He studied history at the University of Auckland and the University of Warwick, England. His short stories, novels, memoirs and biographies have won many awards and accolades. He spearheaded the saving and restoration of the Civic Theatre in Auckland in the 1980s, and is co-founder of the Auckland Writers and Readers Festival. In 2006 was made a Member of the New Zealand Order of Merit, for services to literature and film.
Peter won the New Zealand Book Award for Fiction for his first book of short stories, Dangerous Desires, which was published in New Zealand, New York and London. The book also won, among other awards, the PEN (NZ) Best First Book in Prose Award in 1992. He has published another book of short fiction, The Duration of a Kiss (New York, Sydney and London), and a memoir Long Loop Home, which won the 2002 Montana New Zealand Book Award for Biography. Boy Overboard was shortlisted for the 1998 Commonwealth Prize (Pacific-Asia Region), and among his other novels, Iridescence was runner-up for the Deutz Medal Winner for Fiction at the Montana Book of the Year Awards and a finalist in the Tasmania-Pacific Award. In 2009 Peter Wells won the Copyright Licensing Limited Award to write a book on William Colenso, The Hungry Heart: Journeys with William Colenso, published in 2011, which was shortlisted for the NZ Post Awards. In 2011 Peter Wells was awarded the Michael King Fellowship. Peter has a blog at peterwellsblog.com.
