AustLit

'Written with the same lyrical intensity and spellbinding prose that has won Robert Drewe's fiction international acclaim, The Shark Net is set in the 1950s in a city haunted by the menace of an elusive serial killer. Drewe's youth in the middle-class seaside suburb of Perth, Australia—often described as the most isolated city in the world—takes a sinister turn when a social outcast (who turns out to be an employee of Drewe's father) embarks on a five-year murder spree. This unusual memoir brilliantly evokes the confluence of adolescent innocence and sexual awakening while a hare-lipped killer who eventually murders eight people, including one of Drewe's friends, lurks in the shadows.' (Publication summary).

"Set against the backdrop of the Great Famine, this is the story of the triumph of one woman amidst Ireland's despair. It is August 1845. In Dublin's Botanic Gardens, Phytophora infestans is discovered for the first time. The bacteria was to result in the Great Famine, an event of holocaust proportions that affected every man, woman and child in Ireland. England's shame; Ireland's tragedy . Ellen O'Malley is one such victim. She loses her husband, is duped into going to Australia to lead a better life, leaving three of her beloved children behind. She travels aboard a coffin ship and arrives emaciated and ill with her new baby. But Ellen, a woman with an indomitable spirit, rises above her oppression and eventually returns to wreak revenge on those perpetrators of her misery."

-Publisher's blurb.