Honeybee, Craig Silvey’s highly anticipated new novel, his first since Jasper Jones (2009), chronicles the coming of age of fourteen-year-old transgender narrator Sam Watson, who was assigned male at birth. This is a story of desperate loneliness and fear, of neglect, family violence, betrayal, and self-disgust. But it is also one of love and solidarity, a celebration of the kindness of strangers who become family and friends.

Honeybee takes its place among other recent writing (from Charlotte Wood’s novel The Natural Way of the Things [2015] to Jess Hill’s investigation of family violence in See What You Made Me Do [2019]) that confronts deep-seated and deeply problematic aspects of Australian masculinity. Silvey adds to these representations a consideration of the link between the strict policing of a male/female binary and the physical brutality that – according to Sam’s stepfather, Steve – defines what it means to ‘be a fuckin’ man’.