Description

Some boys come of age. Others survive it.

Wagga Wagga, Australia. 1973. Thirteen-year-old Christian Tambor knows the rules of survival: stay quiet, stay small, stay out of the way. The belt stays on its hook, until it doesn't. His stepfather's calm voice carries more threat than a raised fist ever could. His mother disappears into her cigarettes. And Christian? He disappears into silence.

The war in Vietnam is ending. Pink Floyd plays on someone's radio. Bruce Lee has just died. The world is shifting, but in Christian's house, nothing moves except the shadows. He spends his days clipping newspaper stories, dodging bruises, and haunting the corners of the town library, aching for something he doesn't yet have the language to name.

Then Mary arrives. Barefoot. Fierce. Unafraid. She sees Christian in a way no one else ever has. She asks questions he's never dared to answer. With her, a different kind of boyhood begins to take shape. One where touch doesn't mean pain. One where truth feels possible.

But Wagga is not kind to boys who hesitate. It does not forgive softness. Or hunger. Or difference.

Set against the flickering unrest of 1970s rural Australia, 1973 is a poetic and emotionally raw coming-of-age novel about the quiet brutality of queer repression, and the soft, fragile rebellions that keep a boy alive. For readers who ache for stories like On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous, Shuggie Bain, and A Little Life.

What you'll find in 1973:

– A queer coming-of-age story in working-class Australia
– A boy who feels everything and says almost nothing
– SkyLab, Bruce Lee, and Pink Floyd as emotional texture
– A friendship that borders on salvation
– Lyrical prose exploring trauma, tenderness, and queer longing
– A library that saves a boy's life

Content advisory:
This novel contains depictions of domestic violence, emotional abandonment, and the silencing of queer youth. It also holds moments of unexpected grace. A frog named Albert. A poem that arrives like a breath held too long. And a boy who begins to wonder if softness was never weakness, but survival all along.