Something terrible happens the summer MIchael turns fifteen. But The Incredible Here and Now is not about tragedy. It is about his place, the West, where ‘those who don’t know any better drive through the neighbourhood and lock their car doors’. But Michael knows it intimately and lets the reader in: to the unsettled life of his family, the friends who gather in the McDonald’s car park at night, the one girl who will acknowledge he’s alive, the classmates who drool at the Coke factory on their way to school, the white Pontiac Trans Am that lights up his life like an omen. It is here that he finds an escape from his mother’s growing silence and the absence of his brother Dom, who could charm the whole world with his energy and daring. Michael’s stories are about love and joy and wonder, felt in the company of friends, and in the place he lives in.
“Michael is going through the hardest year of his life, as he walks the streets of Western Sydney, endures school and tentatively reaches out for his first girlfriend. By the end of this fine novel you’ll feel you really know him, his family and his world”. Libby Gleeson
The Incredible here and Now is a Young Adult’s novel written by
Felicity Castagna and published by Giramondo in 2013.
Read excerpts from the text: