About the book

Peter Goldsworthy's high-octane, fourteen-year-old narrator Robbie Burns has creative energy to burn . . . . . . physical and mental, sexual and literary, constructive and destructive. Coming of age in a small town peopled with big characters, he finds his new teacher Miss Peach the most unforgettable of all – his memories of her will haunt him for the rest of his life. Everything I Knew is at once laugh-out-loud funny and cry-out-loud tragic – farcical, horrifying, confronting – and bursting with originality. It challenges our determination to believe in the innocence of childhood and adolescence, and yet again shows Peter Goldsworthy to be a master of shifting tone. There is no novel quite like it in Australian literature. 'Few of his Australian contemporaries are so skilled at the narrative arts as Goldworthy, let alone so fearless in seeking new, rather than familiar, fictional ground to work.' Peter Pierce, SYDNEY MORNING HERALD 'Intelligent, complex and deeply affecting.' Murray Bramwell, ADELAIDE REVIEW 'A bawdy, honest, funny, tragic book about the aspirations of the young and how life happens to them. One of the best novels this year. Simply brilliant.' Ian Nichols, WEST AUSTRALIAN