Louis Nowra, the acclaimed playwright, novelist and screenwriter, never understood why, as a child, his birthday was not celebrated. Only later was he to discover that exactly five years before his birth, his mother killed her father, a Gallipoli war veteran.
In this funny, razor's-edge memoir, which received rave reviews and a placing on the national bestseller lists when published in 1999, Louis Nowra looks back at a fractured family and an unconventional boyhood on the wrong side of Melbourne's tracks.