Book details

Book description

Grief, loss and guilt are enormous burdens for a whole family to carry. A tern will fly to the moon, to live its life in summer  I suppose I d like to have a little bit of that. It s boom time in sixteen-year-old Kenno s coastal holiday town. Tourists are buying and building and developing property, and easy money seems to be everywhere. Even birds flock there to nest on the sand and on the cliffs, out to the islands. But for those who live in the holiday town all year round, there is bleakness too, and Kenno s family, haunted by a terrible loss, struggle to get by. When the family is evicted from their home, Kenno figures they re entitled to a little easy money of their own, and that it s his job to makes things right. Believing it could go a long way to healing them in all their separate ways. Kenno finds a beautiful house and forms a plan to get the money for it. But the closer he gets to the money, the more complicated things become, and when he involves his sister in his plan, who likes to test the world and goes looking for danger, things move quickly beyond his control  Cherise Saywell was born in Lismore NSW and grew up in Casino. She studied English and Cultural Studies at the University of Queensland and then travelled to the UK for a holiday that accidently became more permanent. She worked as an academic researcher and then in television production before the birth of her first child when she began writing fiction. Cherise won the VS Pritchett Prize for her short story 'Beef Queen' in 2003 and was awarded a Scottish Arts Council New Writer Bursary in the same year. She was a runner up in the Asham Award in 2009, collecting the third prize for her story, 'The Candle Garden.' Her short stories have appeared in The London Magazine, New Writing Scotland, Carve Magazine and alongside stories by Margaret Atwood and Yiyun Li, in the Asham Award collection, Waving at the Gardener (Bloomsbury, 2009). Desert Fish, Cherise's first novel emerged out of a desire to try out a longer form, growing from a story idea that couldn't be confined to the parameters of a short story. It was also a way of reconnecting with some of places that resonated from childhood. Cherise has now written two novels Desert Fish and Twitcher.