Cassie McCullough

What an intrigue.

Well, Geordie, you've won me over and you've made your point beautifully with that.

Geordie Williamson and Tegan Bennett-Daylight, what a lovely conversation and what knowledge of books you've brought us today.

Thank you so much.

And Geordie Williamson is the chief literary critic at The Australian and a former publisher of the Picador imprint.

And I'm Cassie McCullough.

There's no trickery in her writing.

It's got her intensity.

Sand, waves and golden summers, blue bottles, broken glass and dangerous undertoes.

Hello and welcome to Radio National's Monthly Book Club.

I'm Kate Evans.

But we're going to begin with Malcolm Knox's novel, the story of a coastal town called Capri, which is just across the water from Ocean City, somewhere on the Australian coast.

We're heading to Bluebird Beach, where a decaying house is full of slightly dilapidated characters.

Yeah.

And also with us is documentary maker, Johan Gabrielsen, who's joined us as a reviewer before, but for today's discussion, we should add that he has lived in Bondi for 20 years.

Johan, welcome.

But Johan, you also made a radio documentary a few years ago for Radio National that included oral history interviews with old surfers.

So you've been interested in the way that surfers talk about themselves?

And Stuart, this character from the 1960s who Johan made a documentary about, is he somebody you had already, you had heard of?

both the real world of australian surfing and its characters its language even the the mythologies that can sit around surfing all of that i think feeds into this novel that we've all read bluebird by malcolm knox and malcolm knox is himself a surfer as well as a journalist a columnist a sports writer with about 20 books under his belt including six novels