The Castoffs. Dieser Artikel ist nicht verfügbar.The Castoffs

Lou Spanner has spent forty years as a Sydney sports journalist, chasing deadlines and back-page exclusives. Now the game is changing around him - younger editors, shrinking budgets, effectiveness measured by 'clicks', and a redundancy lunch he can see coming a mile off. When Spanner kills a fox on his pre-dawn drive through Long Gully, the encounter draws him into the orbit of Albert Moss, a fierce and solitary old man who guards a hidden fox colony on Sydney's North Shore. It also leads him to a chaotic under-nine rugby team at a Jesuit school - a squad of castoffs nobody wanted - and to the mystery of a carmine-red pigeon glimpsed above the Harbour Bridge, tied to a tragedy decades old. Funny, elegiac and deeply humane, The Castoffs is a novel about what gets discarded, and what endures when no one is watching. Set against the sandstone canyons and bush-fringed suburbs of Sydney, it is a story about loyalty, ageing and the unexpected places where purpose is found.

Phil Wilkins was a sports journalist with the Sydney Morning Herald, the Sun-Herald and The Australian newspapers as well as becoming the Australian correspondent for the Wisden Cricket Almanack and Cricketer magazine, for almost five decades. He received the Walkley Award for outstanding journalism in 2004.His autobiography, Hell for Leather, was published by Fair Play Publishing in 2023. This is his first novel.