The Mary Smokes Boys

This compact novel from Australian author Holland (The Source of the Sound) shows restless, alienated youth in the 1980s stuck in their small, rural towns and yearning for better lives. Ten-year-old Grey North, from agrarian Mary Smokes, Queensland, loses his mother, Irene, when she dies giving birth to his sister, who is then named after her. Grey’s father, Bill, a heavy drinker and ne’er-do-well, is seldom at home, and Grey assumes the responsibility of raising Irene. In the meantime, his older best friend, Gordon “Ook” Eccleston, brings him into the local gang, known as the “wild boys.” Bill remarries, with the waitress Angela Teal, but Grey continues his guardianship of Irene, now a high-spirited 14-year-old, while he works as a gas station attendant. He feels trapped by the town’s bleak prospects, especially when his girlfriend, Vanessa Humphries, tells him she’s leaving to work in a law office in Brisbane. Irene is injured while trying to run away from home, and Grey, Bill, and Ook get progressively deeper into trouble trying to pay off her hospital bill. Holland has created an affecting, if downbeat, noirish yarn of life Down Under. (Feb.)