Beaufort Street Books

We are pleased to announce the next Literary Lounge event with local WA author Jon Doust who will be in conversation with Terri-ann White, Wednesday 8th August 2012 at Beaufort Street Books, 6.15pm for 6.30pm.

Jon Doust’s first book, Boy on a Wire featuring the wise cracking Jack Muir was longlisted for a Miles Franklin Award. To the Highlands  is the second book in the trilogy.

About the book -  To the Highlands

It is 1968. All around the world people are marching, protesting, fighting for freedom and free love. Jack Muir arrives in the islands fresh out of Grammar School: a failure, a virgin, and a reluctant employee of The Colonial Bank of Australia. Life in the islands is raw, sensuous, real. Here, the white man takes what he wants. But the veneer of whiteness is flimsy, and brutality never far from the surface. To be free, you must set free. So says George Kanluna, future leader of the islands. Yet there is a world of difference between freedom and those things you unleash in others – and in yourself.

Review: “Doust works deftly: he disturbs us, then he makes us laugh, and, with our prim censure destabilised, helps us move toward an altogether more complicated, and perhaps more compassionate, attitude.” –Kim Scott, author, That Deadman Dance

Review: “What is a man and how does a boy become one? Jack Muir was searching for the answers to these questions in Boy on a Wire, the first book in Jon Doust’s semiautobiographical coming-of-age trilogy, set in an exclusive boys’ boarding school in 1960s Perth, which was longlisted for the Miles Franklin Award.

Readers return to Jack’s story in To the Highlands. It’s 1968—a year of global revolution. Jack still has his sense of humour, he’s finished school and he’s off to work in ‘the islands’ for the Colonial Bank of Australia. Obsessed with losing his virginity, desperate for love but only just discovering lust, and consumed by inexplicable rage and a desire for revenge, Jack is initiated into the expat lifestyle and it swallows him whole. There are more big issues in this book, including racism, misogyny, domestic violence, alcohol abuse, the entitlements of white colonialism and the emerging political independence of an island nation. Named after Randolph Stow’s 1958 Miles Franklin winner To the Islands, this is a compelling, unsettling and confronting sequel to Boy on a Wire. There is a relentless rawness to this book that makes its moments of tenderness hit their mark even more keenly.” — Paula Grunseit, freelance journalist, editor and reviewer, appeared in a recent issue of Bookseller & Publisher magazine.

Wine Tasting provided by local Wine Cellar DeVine Cellars with a WA Vineyard, precedes conversation with Jon Doust on the night.

Tickets for the night are $7.50 and can be reserved by calling us on 08 61427996 or send us an email via our contact page by clicking on this link.  Payment must be made by 6th August to secure your ticket.

We hope to see you on the night.

Jane, Brooke, Lucy, Anna & Deanna.