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Published Sep 2014
464 pages
Genre: Literary Fiction
Publication Information
Fourteen-year-old Daniel Kelly is special. Despite his upbringing in working-class Melbourne, he knows that his astonishing ability in the swimming pool has the potential to transform his life, silence the rich boys at the private school to which he has won a sports scholarship, and take him far beyond his neighborhood, possibly to international stardom and an Olympic medal.
Everything Danny has ever done, every sacrifice his family has ever made, has been in pursuit of this dream. But what happens when the talent that makes you special fails you? When the goal that you've been pursuing for as long as you can remember ends in humiliation and loss?
Twenty years later, Dan is in Scotland, terrified to tell his partner about his past, afraid that revealing what he has done will make him unlovable. When he is called upon to return home to his family, the moment of violence in the wake of his defeat that changed his life forever comes back to him in terrifying detail, and he struggles to believe that he'll be able to make amends. Haunted by shame, Dan relives the intervening years he spent in prison, where the optimism of his childhood was completely foreign.
Tender, savage, and blazingly brilliant, Barracuda is a novel about dreams and disillusionment, friendship and family, class, identity, and the cost of success. As Daniel loses everything, he learns what it means to be a good person - and what it takes to become one.
"This story never quite realizes its full potential but Tsiolkas's sincerity qualifies it as solidly middleweight." - Publishers Weekly
"Immensely moving…Tsiolkas writes with compelling clarity about the primal stuff that drives us all: the love and hate and fear of failure. He is also brilliant on the nuances of relationships….At times, the prose is near to poetry…If it doesn't make you cry, you can't be fully alive." - The Sunday Times (UK)
"Intense…strikingly physical…an almost mystical experience…Tsiolkas again shows a particular ability to create spiky psychological snapshots." - Financial Times (UK)
"[Tsiolkas is] a master chronicler of the zeitgeist... There is no understatement; no silences nor lilting musicality. The words hurtle out as he depicts characters trapped between irreconcilable worlds – middle class and working class, Anglo and Greek, gay and straight, physical and intellectual." - The Guardian (UK)
"Resonant, epic and supremely accomplished…subtle, textured, profoundly human and riveting…This is the work of a superb writer who has completely mastered his craft but lost nothing of his fiery spirit or instinct in so doing. Barracuda is a big achievement." - The Observer (UK)
"Rhapsodic… Barracuda may tell an old, old story, but it has rarely been told in a better way." - The Daily Telegraph (UK)
"Brilliantly sharp...[Barracuda is] literature that engages with our world. It tries to figure out how society is put together and asks questions about how to live within it . . . As such it's vital."—The Australian
"Barracuda is classic Tsiolkas: impassioned, at times brutal... but always riveting." - The Sunday Morning Herald
This information about Barracuda was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Christos Tsiolkas is an internationally bestselling and award-winning novelist, playwright, essayist, and screenwriter. His novel The Slap has sold more than one million copies worldwide and has been published in twenty-eight countries.
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