Sweeney and the bicycles by Philip Salom

Sweeney has suffered a brutal bashing while in prison for stealing drugs, and now has an acquired brain injury. He is attending regular sessions with psychologist Asha Sen, and through EMDR might be getting closer to understanding how he has been impacted by the childhood trauma and guilt caused by his bullying father and alcoholic mother. However he still seeks the thrill and exhilaration of riding away on stolen hipster bikes, returning them once his ride is over, unless they are a particularly sleek model, which he adds to his clandestine collection.

In his most recent book, prizewinning poet and Miles Franklin-listed novelist Salom has conjured up a most unlikely cast of eccentric characters, some more likeable than others, all meekly seeking their place in a world that they have difficulties understanding.

In Melbourne, Sweeney moves between the comfortable house bequeathed to him by his beloved grandmother and the run-down boarding house where he cohabits with his quasi-family of misfits, including the enforcer The Sherriff, the enigmatic Froggie, and simple Jim Smith.

Coincidences abound, and after stealing her bike, Sweeney meets Rose, a traffic-flow analyst and client of Asha, and convinces her, with her super-human eyesight, to type his scrawled handwritten memoir. And so a peculiar friendship develops.

While Asha is helping her clients, her husband Bruce Leach is designing and justifying ever-more sophisticated facial recognition technology for the government. Sweeney is alert to the CCTV in the streets and low-flying drones, so creates a complicated camouflage, painting his face with letters and symbols when he goes out stealing. In their conversations and therapy, all the characters, at some point, raise questions of how, or whether, security and privacy can exist together.

Through the sweet relationships that the characters develop, in his characteristically poetic voice, Salom addresses contemporary issues concerning surveillance, data collection and analysis, self-identity and the position of those on the fringes of society; communes, prison, boarding houses.

Themes: Identity, Family, Community, Trauma, Friendship.

Margaret Crohn