I have just finished Breath by Tim Winton. As a poet with a regular focus on the sea and as a reader already well acquainted with the other two great portraitists of the West Australian coast, Robert Drewe and Roland Leach, it’s one of life’s funny accidents that I hadn’t yet touched on Winton.

This coming-of-age novel, whilst exploring a created link between various aquatic challenges and autoerotic asphyxiation, does create a troika of profoundly believable male characters and eventually one believable female one. There is some great language and an imparted love/knowledge of the ocean. But the end is a jumble of tied-off loose ends.