Broken Shore Book

Challenge: review "The Broken Shore" without mentioning how "Australian" it is.

There are a lot of reviews on this site expressing frustration with The Broken Shore for its dialectical idiosyncrasies. I won't take this opportunity to express my frustration at the way in which shit rolls downhill, obliging Australian readers to maintain a familiarity with British and American dialects, but rendering Australian dialects "unreadable" to our northern cousins. I won't mention that gripe at all.

What I can say about the writing is that it is the best representation of everyday Australian speech I have ever come across. The dialect is there in all its glory - oblique, ungrammatical, sweary, replete with bold references to taboo subjects and clever euphemisms for the most innocuous ideas, often dreamt up for the speaker's own amusement. Foreign readers - American readers in particular - should note that the word "cunt" is often employed in this book and in everyday speech in Australia. It's not a malicious word, more often than not, and is rarely accompanied by the sexist/misogynist connotations that it carries in other contexts. If it offends or shocks you, try substituting "bloke" for "cunt". Read the original sentence the same way you would read it with the substituted word; don't dwell on the language that offends you; read it as it was intended.