“Set during the early 1970s upheaval in the area when the hippies, the Jesus generation and the drug economy converged, Vale Byron Bay is about a working town reshaped by the spiritual seekers and the criminals who determined its fate. The definitive Byron experience – albeit a haunting one – is all here in this big, bold novel by one of Australia’s most powerful and original new voices.”  Good Reading

“Wayne Grogan’s sentences open like flowers and snap shut like switchknives. In his power-driven language he portrays 1970s Byron Bay as a kind of frontier town, lustrous with possibility and already populated by visionaries, con-men, sadistic cops, tremulous souls and hopeful refugees from the big cities. I read it all in one day and woke up the next morning still haunted. With its radiant setting, emotional resonance and heartbreaking characters, this book glows like a sunset over a troubled sea.”  Kate Holden

“Savagely honest and unsentimental, it stings like a winter surf. Grogan has truly captured the other side of paradise.”  Robert Drewe

“This brooding and capriciously brilliantly novel is a bright star on the dimmish horizon of recent Australian literature”  Helen Elliott, The Age.