Big Brother Is Watching

A saga about a family of boys living on their own terms is full of violence, pain, love and compassion.

- Sally Blundell

Five brothers, four animals, three deaths, two continents and one bridge connect this complex family saga by The Book Thief author

Markus Zusak. When we meet the five Dunbar boys they are living in the racing quarter in an outlying suburb of Sydney. Their mother is dead, their father has disappeared. They live a hardscrabble life in an old rundown villa, a place of arguments, fights, 1980s movies, wayward pets and a piano that is determinedly never played.

The narrator is eldest boy Matthew, a passive observer recording the story of his parents and four brothers: Rory, Henry, Clayton and Thomas. But it is Clay, son number four, whose story drives events. As Matthew tells us, “Everything happened to him. We were all of us changed through him.”