Set in a small town in New Zealand, the story is told through the eyes of a gauche thirteen year-old boy called Jimmy Sullivan. It is the haunting tale of a young boy growing up in a catholic household, seeing things he shouldn't and struggling to cope. The book appears to be domestic in scope and provincial in vision, but by the end of the novel, the reader has encountered murder, and witnessed the warping of a promising mind and the destruction of a family. In this deceptively modest masterpiece, the cruelty beneath society's surface is revealed, all the more devastatingly so, through the ordinariness of the location.