Good Young Men is out now!

This book means so much to me. It began as an idea in 2021 – a scene of a boy leaving his secret boyfriend’s room after a meet up. I then worked on this idea while on an alumni residency at Varuna Writer’s House in Katoomba in late 2022. That story blossomed into Jordy’s first few chapters. After about twenty-thousand words, I shelved the idea. I had gotten to the point where Jordy’s story starts in Good Young Men, and didn’t know where else to go.

Sometime in 2022, after finishing the edits of my second novel, I started another story about a boy who’d just been expelled from a fancy private school. I was inspired by The Catcher in the Rye, which I loved, and wanted to explore a similar story from the perspective of an Aboriginal boy from a small country town, who came from near poverty and this scholarship he’d received to attend the school was not just a big opportunity for him, but a big opportunity for his family as well. I’d gotten to about the third chapter of Kallum’s story before I decided to shelve the idea. Again, I didn’t know where to go after he’d returned to his hometown and reunited with his old friends.

After shelving these ideas, I wrote my third novel. Sometime in the editing period of 2023, I saw a story in the news about an Aboriginal boy who had been killed by a police officer during an arrest. This was sometime after the white police officer was cleared of any responsibility. It was around the same time as the Voice to parliament referendum, and it was a difficult time to be an Aboriginal man in this country. Well, it was that way for me, anyway. In the pain of that time, I began to form the story of Dylan, whom we meet later in the book. I wrote about half of his story as it appears in the book, then began to feel a desire to revisit Kallum’s and Jordy’s stories. I’m sure it’s a pretty common thing for authors – competing ideas, unsure which to give the creative energy to at the moment.

Then, like a real lightbulb moment, I thought: what if they all grew up on the same street?

I wanted to explore what it felt like as a friend, as an old friend, as a community, when such a tragedy occurs. And so I began crafting the story of Good Young Men.

This book feels different to me than my others. I guess as a writer, you always feel like you get better with time, but I really do believe with my whole heart that this book is my best so far. For teen readers, they will read a story that is funny at times, infuriating at others, and filled with tragedy and hope. I hope I got the balance right. Books are so important because they are magic. They have the power to change you, to show you different truths, to speak to something inside you that you didn’t know existed. Books for young adults are arguably more important, as they speak specifically to the leaders of the future at a time in their lives when they are forming their identities and figuring out what impact they will have on the world. I hope my book speaks to them in a way that means something. That said, it’s easy to get caught up in the mindset of ‘books have to say something about the world’, and ‘books have to mean something’. They do – I’m not saying they don’t have to say something. But I do hope readers genuinely enjoy this book and don’t feel like they just wasted hours or days or weeks with these characters. While it is a dark book at times, I do hope my readers have some fun along the way, that they found the writing engaging and, most importantly, that they cared about these characters.

I care about these characters. I spent years with them, and they are a part of me now – like Jackson, Jamie and Jonah – just as I am very much part of all of my characters, too.

Now, the book belongs to the readers, and I’ll go off for a couple months and speak about it until people get tired of hearing from me. And I’ll move onto the next project, armed with the tools and skills I’ve earned from writing this one.

If you read my books, one of them or all of them, thank you from the bottom of my heart.

Gary