We are proud to publish The Castoffs, the debut novel from Phil Wilkins, one of Australia's most distinguished sports journalists.
Phil covered cricket, rugby union and rugby league for more than five decades, travelling the world with Australian teams and filing from press boxes from the SCG to Lord's. He was a writer's writer - respected by colleagues, trusted by players, known for the quality of his prose as much as the reliability of his reporting.
The Castoffs is the novel he carried with him for years, worked on across many seasons, and finally completed. It is a different kind of writing from anything he published in the papers, but it carries the same sharp eye, the same ear for dialogue, and the same deep affection for the people sport brings together.
The story opens before dawn on Sydney's North Shore. Lou Spanner, a veteran afternoon newspaper journalist, is driving to work when he hits and kills a fox on Long Gully Drive. It's a small event on a quiet road, but it pulls at him. He goes back. He starts asking questions; about the foxes, about the valley, about the creatures that live in the margins of a city that doesn't notice them.
What follows is a novel that moves between three worlds.
There is the newsroom - brilliantly rendered, full of deadline panic, office politics, gallows humour and the slow, painful contraction of an industry Spanner has given his life to. There is the valley, where Albert Moss, a fierce and solitary old man, tends a hidden fox colony and wants nothing to do with journalists or their stories. And there is a chaotic under-nine rugby team at a Jesuit school, a squad of castoffs assembled from boys nobody else wanted, whom Spanner begins to coach with no pay and no particular plan.
Threading through all of it is the mystery of a carmine-red pigeon glimpsed above the Harbour Bridge, tied to a tragedy decades old and to the question of what we owe the people and creatures we've overlooked.
The Castoffs is literary fiction with a sporting heart. It is funny, warm and human.
Phil writes Sydney - its light, its sandstone, its bush-fringed suburban edges - with the intimacy of someone who has walked its streets for a lifetime. His dialogue is pitch-perfect, his characters lived-in and real. The newsroom scenes alone are worth the cover price giving a vivid, affectionate portrait of a world that barely exists anymore.
Above all, it is a novel about loyalty. To animals, to young players who need someone in their corner, to a profession under siege, and to the stubborn conviction that the things other people discard might be the things that matter most.
Phil's autobiography, Hell for Leather, was published by us in 2023.
Available now in paperback and e-book from us and really good bookstores.