Notes

Find me here where the sea meets the land
Where the rocks are black and so is the sand

On the wild west coast of Aotearoa, twelve-year-old Ned lives with his mother in a bach above Te Henga's black sand beach. He is thoughtful and observant, the sort of boy who knows that too much in his life is unexplained. His cousin Hugo is different. Restless, he pushes towards trouble. Alice stands apart from them, older, still tethered to memories of a childhood in the Northern Territory.

With an ochre rock at the beating heart of this story, their journey draws Ned, Hugo, and Alice from New Zealand's volcanic shoreline to Australia's red desert. Along the way, they begin to uncover the silences surrounding the women who raised them, absent fathers, and the consequences of choices made long before they were old enough to question.