[1] Ned West is a young man living on his family's apple orchard, Limberlost, near a large river in the north of Tasmania.

This novel tells the story of Ned as an adolescent, trapping and shooting rabbits over his summer school holidays to sell their pelts in order to raise money so he can buy a boat.

[2] In the Australian Book Review Jennifer Mills wrote: "There is a vivid, sensory physicality in the texture of timber, apples, or pesticide spray on the skin, and a few of the grotesque infections that remind us of his characters’ vulnerability to rot.

In an otherwise elegiac and plaintive novel, there are also colourful descriptions, like that of a man ‘made mostly of lint, capillaries and brandy vapour’, that artfully sketch whole characters and provide some levity...Limberlost is a book of difficult small choices: about what to care for, and what to hang on to, and what it's like to love things and people and animals and places you are powerless to save.

Even as it looks back over the twentieth century, there is an Anthropocene tilt to this book's sense of a world slipping away, its appreciation of human inadequacy.