Craig Silvey · 2009 · coming-of-age

Craig Silvey's 2009 novel, set over one summer in 1965 in a Western Australian mining town. Jasper Jones knocks on a thirteen-year-old's window at night and takes him into the bush to show him a dead girl - and asks him to help hide the body, because Jasper is Aboriginal and knows exactly who the town will blame.

1. 1
   Corrigan

   A small wheatbelt town modelled on Corrigin, in the summer Australia sent its first battalion to Vietnam. Charlie Bucktin reads To Kill a Mockingbird and does not yet know he is about to be living in it.

2. 2
   Jasper's glade

   A clearing in the bush with a dam and a eucalypt, where Laura Wishart is hanging - and where two boys make a decision at one in the morning that neither of them is old enough to make.

3. 3
   The river

   Where they swim and where Charlie learns to dive, and where the summer is at its best and least complicated - the counterweight the book keeps returning to while the town gets worse.

4. 4
   Mad Jack Lionel's

   The house every child in Corrigan is frightened of, and the old man who turns out to have been carrying a version of the same story for fifty years - which is where the truth about Laura's family starts to come apart.

5. 5
   Corrigan

   Jeffrey Lu's family have their garden destroyed and their windows broken while Jeffrey wins the cricket, and Charlie's mother leaves - and the town does not become better, it just moves on to the next thing.