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An expose of contemporary life seen from the perspective of an eleven-year-old boy. Shaun, a country boy, is orphaned after a bushfire and must now live in the city where he meets many lonely, mixed-up residents. Can his world of benign nature and theirs of dispirited culture, be reconciled? It is a story of polarities: the country and the city; nature and culture; the material and the digital; the spirit and the flesh; lost faith and renewed hope.

In 2004 the author found a little diary of 386 pages written by a 62-year-old man in a nursing home. This story is inspired by that diary. E=mc2? Jack Smythe thinks Einstein is wrong and he has a theory to prove it. But he's no physicist. Instead, he's been a homeless kid, a palmreader, a cosmic theorist, a father of two (who probably aren't his) and a devoted companion to his sister Kitty who has her own demons. But now at 62, he wakes after an operation to find he's been placed at Eden, a below-average nursing home. Here he is confronted by Nurse Stinson, Collier the Hun, Pistol Pete, Skeleton Joe, Dooley the publican, Jim the ex-politician and Jim's rebel granddaughter, among others. He wants nothing to do with any of them. Instead, with wry wit Jack begins a story about Kitty starting with the day they ran away from home for good. It seems Jack is always running away and ultimately there's a daring escape at Eden. But unknown to Jack, it's the'muddle of geriatrics'at Eden that eventually put meaning in his life.