Tenderfoot

Tenderfoot is magnificent. Deeply moving. Beautiful. Powerful. Trent Dalton

By the bestselling, award-winning author of Addition, an exhilarating novel about coming of age in 1970s Australia

Wait for the boxes to open, wait for the race to begin. Wait, and your greyhound will cease to be the dog you know and become an entirely different kind of animal.

Brisbane, 1975: Andie Tanner's world is small but whole. Her mum is complicated, but she adores her dad and the kennel of racing greyhounds that live under their house. Andie is a serious girl with plans: finish school with her friends, then apprentice to her father until she can become a greyhound trainer, with dogs of her very own.

But real life rarely goes to plan, and the world is bigger and more complicated than Andie could imagine. When she loses everything she cares about - her family, her friends, the dogs - it's up to Andie to reclaim her future. She will need all her wits to survive this new reality of secrets and half-truths, addictions and crime.

With luminous, aching prose, Tenderfoot will move you like no other story this year.

Tenderfoot is a wonder, its people, dogs, and social and emotional landscapes vividly observed. Toni Jordan reimagines the coming-of-age novel, giving us Andie, a narrator of marvellous complexity - brave, clearsighted and resourceful - as she inhabits or looks back at the mysteries dividing the worlds of children and adults. At once poignant and propulsive, this is Jordan's finest work yet. I loved it. Lucy Treloar

Compelling and heartwarming with a cast of unforgettable characters. I loved this trip back to 1970s Brisbane, and the sometimes shady world of greyhound racing, through Andie's eyes. She's smart and resilient, which is just as well, given what life throws her way. As is so often the case, a quest for the truth turns out to be a rite of passage. What a delight. Inga Simpson

Tenderfoot is a breath of fresh air in Australian literature, for its compassion, its wisdom and its humour. I adored this story of a gifted child battling valiantly against the cruelty of the adult world. Jordan surveys the ordinary world with a loving gaze, yet with a clear-eyed understanding of its heartrending injustice, especially for the animals who give us so much for so very little in return. I love this book! Emily Bitto

Praise for the novels of Toni Jordan including Nine Days and Addition, now a major film:

'Jordan is one of this country's most exceptional writers' Better Reading

'Jordan combines pace and humour with a razor intelligence' Sydney Morning Herald