Set in Sydney in the 1950s when American film stars and teenage rock n roll idols were beginning to influence Australian culture, Boys of Summer is the coming-of-age account of Tom Krupa's childhood. His is the world of backyard adventures, radio serials, comic-book heroes and the passion he develops for reading; it is also the story of a sensitive, innocent child awakening to the cruel realities of the world. Tom is the eye-witness to two seminal incidents: a girl killed by a car and a boy lost in the sea at a beach. The girl was his first, distant love and the boy his best friend. These events have been carefully prefigured in the depiction of Tom's day-to-day life with his Polish migrant parents in an outer western suburb. Neither is quite as it appears, and the implications of each reverberate through the novel.