Exploded View

At the end of the 1970s, in a neglected suburb on Perth's fringe, a sinister man moves in with the narrator's family. A mechanic, he fixes cars without a licence in the backyard. The girl, a teenager who no longer talks, works beside him on the Holdens and turns to a stolen workshop manual as if it could tell her what to do, because she is sure that the place to hurt him is the engine, where his heart seems to be. She resists first by keeping silent and later by sabotage, and after dark she takes cars and drives off alone. In brief scenes that shift between I and you, the novel stays inside the mind of a girl harmed by neglect and abuse, who sees her body as a machine that, once dismantled, cannot be reassembled.

AI-generated summary

About the book

Form

Novel

Length

192 pages in the original

Genres

Coming of age, Family (assigned by AI)

Set in

Australia, late 1970s

First published

2019

Author's age

54 when first published

ISBN

9781925773415 (Text Publishing, Australia)

9781922268662 (Text Publishing, Australia)