Kate Evans

I was born and raised here.

So was Maloof.

And I read Jono when I was in school in the mid-70s, early 70s, because the book was set in Brisbane.

And the books, I wasn't from a family of readers, but, you know, I'd encountered literature the first time in secondary school.

And so, you know, like we'd read Dickens, we'd read

Salinger, we'd read The Great Gatsby, and suddenly to have the next book that came in the English course around the age of 15 or 16 that I was, for it to be a Brisbane novel, so beautifully written, with great sensitivity, but also covered a time of

And this is where it got even more personal for me was that it covered Brisbane through the Second World War with the arrival of the American soldiers in Brisbane, which was something that my father, who was not a great talker, lived through when he was like 14 or 15.

So I heard about this over the kitchen table, you know, like Brisbane in the Second World War.

So that was another wave that came with the book was reading about my hometown so beautifully.

And, you know, with criticism in there and, you know, just the architecture and, you know, a river city and all of these sort of things.

But also this sort of Second World War thing that was in there, you know, like I was just, you know, it didn't inspire.

I didn't know that I was ever going to write a book or do anything.

But I can remember reading this and it being quite electric.

And it's a book that I highly recommend.

It is extraordinary.

Can I just have to say that I have to pay the toll like everybody else?

When it was named back in 2008, my manager at the time, who's still my manager, tried to give me one cent a car.

That's what they do.

Yeah.

And it didn't happen, obviously.