AustLit

'In her early 20s, Kathryn Heyman spent a season aboard a six-berth fishing trawler, Ocean Thief, that was scouring the Gulf of Carpentaria for tiger prawns. She’d hitchhiked up the coast from Sydney with a handful of clothes, a flick-knife she didn’t know how to use, and 10kg of books. It was an escape plan without a plan: “I had no deadline, no outcome, no-one waiting,” Heyman explains in Fury. “There was no-one to care for me, only myself, and I had never learned the lessons of caring.” She arrived on deck as Kacey, an untested galley cook who couldn’t fry an egg; she left as Kathryn, a toil-hardened deckhand. It was a transformation – a strengthening – that made other transformations possible.' (Introduction)