Blundstones and a Brown Dog is about living in the real world with your heart and your eyes wide open. This collection, written over a twenty-five-year period, speaks about the perplexity of simple things: love, death, longing, friendship, hope. Its voice is human, fallible, incomplete. It's about the journey and the dreaming; it's about lives as precious and fragile as fine china. Christopher Nailer was born in New Zealand. He is married to Helen, has daughters Ruth and Lindsay, and a brown dog. He's had various careers so far and now teaches in Canberra.

January, Melbourne, hot mid-summer. The holidays fizzle in a kind of endless dryness. A heat haze off the bitumen and the ache of the afternoon sun. A bunch of kids starts grade six at Peel Street School. It's the high tide of the post-war migrant boom; every term there's someone new - from England, Ireland, Italy, Greece, Germany, Hungary, Holland, Russia... It's a magical year, the last year of innocence, a year poised between new growth and the hardening of a tangible future - the last year before adolescence decides who will thrive, who will struggle and who will falter...