The Castoffs

Sydney, the early 2000s. Lou Spanner is a veteran sports journalist facing redundancy, a man whose world is shrinking just as he begins to notice the wild things living at its edges. When he kills a fox on his pre-dawn drive to work, it sets in motion an unlikely set of connections: to Albert Moss, the fierce, solitary guardian of a Long Gully fox colony; to a ragtag under-nine rugby team nobody expects anything of; and to the mystery of a carmine-red pigeon seen above the Harbour Bridge on the day a young Irish immigrant fell to his death decades before. Unfolding across the bush-fringed suburbs of Sydney's North Shore, The Castoffs is a novel about the overlooked and the discarded: animals, people and stories that slip through the cracks of a city that doesn't stop moving. Funny, elegiac and deeply humane, Phil Wilkins's debut fiction draws on a lifetime of observing how the world actually works, and who it leaves behind.