Tight Lines

A moving and transformational novel that explores friendship, family, expectation and how one choice can have devastating and far-reaching consequences.

I never meant to get so drunk. Each time it happened I swore it would be the last time and the next time I had a drink I believed that I could chug it down and it’d somehow end different. Drinking felt like living, which makes little sense. I didn’t even like the taste of beer back then and I usually ended up stumbling around and hurting myself. But, truthfully, cracking a tinnie made me giddy.

Luke, Josh and Matty live for the summer: surfing, fishing, girls at the caravan park and drinking. But, like the wild coast they call home, the tide can change from safe to catastrophic in an instant. Just as adulthood is about to begin, one terrible decision will ruin the lives of all involved. We follow the characters into adulthood as they try to find their way back to the freedom they took for granted when they were young. But life moves on, and they each discover they can never go back to the way things were.

Set against the nostalgic backdrop of small-town coastal life in the 1990s, this novel is funny, moving, confronting and deeply life-affirming. With echoes of Favel Parrett’s Past the Shallows and Tim Winton’s Breath, Tight Lines leaves us with a sense of hard-fought survival and shining hope.