Ocean Road (Glyn Parry, Fremantle Press, $27.95 pb, ISBN 9781863633548, October) ***

It’s summer, 1976—Frank, Laura and their son Toby are holidaying at a seaside cottage, but this is a summer of uncertain times where a marriage and three lives are changed forever. In Ocean Road 17-year-old Toby lays bare all that eventuates during that one fragile summer. Western Australian writer Glyn Parry is perhaps better known to readers as a young adult writer, Ocean Road being his first foray into adult fiction. He hasn’t totally abandoned the young adult realm, though, as this story is seen through the eyes of a teenager who acutely observes his parents and the ways of the adult world he is soon to enter. In Ocean Road Parry paints his characters with fine brushstrokes and great affection, and manages to avoid falling into melodrama and sentimentality. This is a short novel: a slow-moving family drama where little appears to happen yet so much does. A phone call, a chance meeting, and nothing will ever be the same again. Parry writes teenagers well and avoids cliché: there is a gentleness and wisdom to Toby as he tells his story and it is this character who gives this ambling novel its legs.

Deborah Crabtree is a Melbourne-based fiction writer and bookseller

This review from Australian Bookseller & Publisher magazine is reproduced by kind permission of Thorpe-Bowker, a division of R R Bowker LLC. © Copyright 2007, Thorpe-Bowker