Rush Oh Shirley Barrett by Shirley Barrett 9780349006659, 0349006652 instant download after payment.

An impassioned, charming, and hilarious debut novel about a young woman's coming-of-age, during one of the harshest whaling seasons in the history of New South Wales from the Winner of the Camera D'Or

"Hugely funny and peopled with a cast of characters I came to treasure like my own friends, Rush Oh! reminded me why I love reading."   -  Hannah Kent, author of Burial Rites

When Mary Davidson, the eldest daughter of a whaling family in Eden, New South Wales, sets out to chronicle the particularly difficult season of 1908, the story she tells is poignant and hilarious, filled with drama and misadventure. It's a season marked not only by the sparsity of whales and the vagaries of weather but also by the arrival of John Beck, an itinerant whale man with a murky past, on whom Mary promptly develops an all-consuming crush. But hers is not the only romance to blossom amidst the blubber...

Swinging from Mary's hopes and disappointments, both domestic and romantic, to the challenges that beset their tiny whaling operation, Rush Oh! is a celebration of an extraordinary episode in Australian history, when a family of whalers formed a fond, unique allegiance with a pod of frisky Killer whales - and in particular, a Killer whale named Tom.

"Rush Oh! is an elegiac tale, recounting the dissolution of both the whaling outfit and the Davidson clan. But Mary’s voice is so fresh and Ms Barrett’s sidewinding story so spry and amusing that readers will think less of endings than of the auspicious start to a novelist’s career."   -   Sam Sacks, The Wall Street Journal