The poetic and comic story of a young man's search for love and meaning in his dysfunctional, inner-urban world, and the search for his own path in life.
The narrator of the story is Jay, a young man who drifts. In primary school he teams up with Bones, the son of a truck driver who lives down the road. Bones is "a maniac, basically" - a kid with a desperate, who-cares streak. From playing Truth or Dare with local girls, visiting the churchyard at night and breaking into the sports pavilion, they move on to experimenting with graffitti in secondary school.
When Shelley arrives on the scene in Year 9, they form a natural trio and for a while everything looks good; then the equilateral triangle becomes an eternal struggle. "Two's company", comments Jay; "Three's a maggot heap." Bones leaves school early but later loses his job - the beginning of a downward slide into petty crime and drugs. Jay has to decide wither to go along with Bones, for whom he feels a mixture of fascination, camaraderie and fear, or strike out on his own, moving into the driving seat of his own life.
Written with a wry, gentle humour and a keen eye for detail, 'The Passenger Seat' is a modern-day rite-of-passage novel about a young man beginning to find his place in the world.
