It is 1967, and as New Zealand hesitates over whether to send more troops to Vietnam, and the strains of All You Need is Love echo from Abbey Road out across the world, students take to the streets of Wellington to protest the war. Among them are Race, Candy, Chadwick and FitzGerald and their elusive, electrifying, Maori friend Morgan Tawhai. They are young and they are hopeful and the world is all before them.
Forty years later, Race's son Toby is navigating his own path across the landscape of a world still trembling with the reverberations of 9/11. Uncertain of whether love is really all he needs, or whether his parent's experiences have shown the opposite to be true, Toby, with his girlfriend JoJo and his friend Caspar, watches the centuries-old fragments of a comet fall across the sky and feels the earth turning beneath him.
As Race and his companions move through the final decades of the twentieth century, their friendships tested and pulled apart and reconfigured anew, they come to discover that Morgan - who burned as brightly as any comet, who could quote Shakespeare and Sterne, Dorothy Parker and Bob Dylan, and who will forever remain the twenty-year-old they once knew - is both the mystery and the touchstone of their lives.
From the shores of New Zealand to the political heart of Washington and the hills above Beirut, Some Here Among Us is a stunning meditation on youth and promise and loss, and above all, a novel for our times.
