Fly, By Anne Witherall

Melbourne in the 1980s produced some of the most ferocious punk and post-punk the country ever heard, and almost none of it made it into the official record. FLY is part of the unofficial one.

Anne Witherall's novel drops you into the squat scene without nostalgia or apology. Agro gets rejected by suburbia for being a freak and runs toward the only place that might make sense, which is a story anyone who grew up alternative in this country knows in their bones. It's raw, vivid, and grounded in a Melbourne underground that existed before it could be aestheticised or archived. This is not a coffee table book about the good old days. It's closer to a document, and a genuinely gripping one. The kind of thing you'd find passed around at a gig, dog-eared and annotated.

Paperback. Published in Australia.