Old Boy

A daughter’s telling of her father’s tale of addiction, resurrection, dumb luck and love.

Her whole life, Georgia’s father has told her she will be the one to write his story. It’s a story in which living is just a game of chance: why did Grant Tree survive when others didn’t? Why did he find love and happiness, and a grown daughter to spill his story to so that she can record the whole beautiful, unlikely mess of it? Told in parallel to Grant’s story is the life of his friend and dealer Brian Geoffrey Chambers, known in the book as Charlie, who was ultimately executed in Malaysia for drug smuggling.

Narrated in vivid, conversational detail as transcribed by Grant’s daughter from hours of recorded interviews and underlaid with research into life in Perth and the north-west from the 1930s to 1988, this memoir details the rites of passage of young manhood, ordinariness, dysfunction, and what is like to live on the edges of other more ordinary suburban working class Australians.

PRAISE FOR THE BOOK

‘I read it in bed, then in an Uber, then on a plane, then at the baggage carousel, then in a taxi, then back home in bed. At no time was there anything I would rather have been doing. Old Boy is beautiful, elegiac and, at times, painfully moving.’ Weekend Australian

‘Throughout the tale, Grant comes off as a sort of West Australian Forrest Gump with a heroin habit, in that he pops up on the peripheries of a number of critical junctures in the State’s history and has contact — sometimes fleeting, sometimes not — with some of its most well-known characters.’ Sunday Times