By Phil Wilkins

The Castoffs

$32.99
$32.99

26 May 2026

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Sydney, the early 2000s. Lou Spanner is a veteran sports journalist facing redundancy, a man whose world is shrinking just as he begins to notice the wild things living at its edges.

When he kills a fox on his pre-dawn drive to work, it sets in motion an unlikely set of connections: to Albert Moss, the fierce, solitary guardian of a Long Gully fox colony; to a ragtag under-nine rugby team nobody expects anything of; and to the mystery of a carmine-red pigeon seen above the Harbour Bridge on the day a young Irish immigrant fell to his death decades before.

Unfolding across the bush-fringed suburbs of Sydney's North Shore, The Castoffs is a novel about the overlooked and the discarded: animals, people and stories that slip through the cracks of a city that doesn't stop moving. 

Funny, elegiac and deeply humane, Phil Wilkins's debut fiction draws on a lifetime of observing how the world actually works, and who it leaves behind.

More Information

  • Format: Paperback
  • Published:  May 2026
  • ISBN:  978-1-923236-56-1
  • 978-1-923236-57-8 (ePub)
  • Weight: 0.5kg
  • Size:  229mm x 152mm
  • Pages:  350 pages (TBC)
  • Imprint: Popcorn Press

About the Author

Phil Wilkins was a sports journalist with the Sydney Morning Herald, the Sun-Herald and The Australian newspapers as well as becoming the Australian correspondent for the Wisden Cricket Almanack and Cricketer magazine, for almost five decades. He received the Walkley Award for outstanding journalism in 2004.

His autobiography, Hell for Leather, was published by Fair Play Publishing in 2023. This is his first novel.

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$32.99
$32.99
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