Coming of age is familiar territory for first-time novelists – the journey from youth to adult maturity. First novels often draw on personal experience. For the reader, they can feel like a hybrid of memoir and fiction. In these three debut novels, growing up happens very differently for each protagonist, across diverse Australian settings.
The territory they inhabit variously hovers between the recognisable real world, in two coastal novels that include themes of parental closeness and estrangement, and the purely imaginary – in a dystopian debut where the protagonist grows up in a near-future where it never stops raining.
