Twelve-year-old Billy Gilmore from Belfast thought life in Australia would be as perfect as the sea voyage out, but the Grove in 1953 is little more than a cluster of homes and a shop or two at Killen’s Corner, bordered by a lonely expanse of beach, sand dunes and tea tree. His teachers are moody, his mother pines for her faraway sisters and his father is rarely home. Even the fish in the Barwon River refuse to be caught.

Billy retreats into a surreal world of science fiction magazines and radio dramas. He begins to have strange dreams and troubling recollections of events in his past. A chance discovery among the family trunks in the garage fires his suspicions. Was his father really the war hero Billy fondly imagines? Did his father fall in love with another woman? Might he do so again?

Billy needs help. Who else is there to turn to but a world-weary reporter on the city rounds for Nightbeat on late-night radio?