WINNER - OCKHAM NEW ZEALAND BOOK AWARD FOR FICTION - 2016

At only 11 years of age Lew was given an apprenticeship to hard-man shearer Painter Hayes. The beginning of his new life meant one less mouth for his abandoned mother to feed, but it also meant he would never see her again. But Lew's a grown man now. And with this latest job, shearing for John Drysdale and his daughter Clara, everything will change. In lucid, rippling prose Stephen Daisley speaks of how things work, and why; of the profound satisfaction in hard work done with care; of love and friendship and the damange that both contain.

'One of the finest debut novels I have read. Indeed it's one of the best novels I have read in recent years.' Stephen Romei, Australian on Traitor

Stephen Daisley was born in 1955 and grew up in the North Island of New Zealand. He has worked on sheep and cattle stations, on oil and gas construction sites and as a truck driver, among many other jobs. Stephen's first novel, Traitor, won the 2011 Prime Minister's Literary Award for Fiction. He lives in Western Australia with his wife and five children.