Whole Wild World

In this exuberant and compelling memoir of family and childhood, readers will be swept away by Tom Dusevic's verve, warmth and honesty.

Suburban Sydney in the 1970s is an adventure playground, especially for a busybody, free-range kid with energy, big appetites and ungodly urges. In such open space, backyards are arenas for daydreaming and free play, scars are marks of wisdom and school is an obstacle course between pleasure and pain. And so is home, as the author tries to make sense of his parents' history and identity, known but unknowable, as post-war refugees from Croatia. He longs to be liberated from the family's quirks and the past and finds his escape in quiet moments of awe and simplicity.

This is a sensory tale of a glorious time to grow up in Australia by a visceral writer whose epiphanies are as startling as they are hilarious. From rowdy street protests and footy crowds, to the serenity of the Roselands Raindrop Fountain and storm-water canals, to the fevered set of a TV quiz show and the disco floor, Dusevic launches himself into the whole wild world.

‘It is exuberance, it is joy. Whole Wild World is the rare pearl that needed no irritant, no niggling little grain of sand at its heart, to make it grow. It bursts with the curiosity and energy of a child, the same open eyes, the same open heart.’ - James Jeffrey, The Australian

‘Tom Dusevic's memoir is the most precious kind of reading experience: it is joy on every page. It is beautifully written, vibrant and true: simultaneously a detailed record of an experience of time and place and family, but also transcending simple factual recount to be a work of pure imagination. Tom manages to re-inhabit his Sydney childhood with the perfect writerly combination of immediacy, resonance and distance, and in achieving that balance, he makes the personal universal. Do yourself a favour. Buy this memoir’ - Katharine Murphy, political editor, Guardian Australia

You can read an extract of Whole Wild World as posted here on SBS.