Not Swinging, Swooning

‘It’s early in the morning,’ a boy writes in his diary, ‘on the first day of the first year of the most modern decade in the whole of human history. Get in the groove!’ Stevan Eldred-Grigg, the boy, is seven years old and one of the middle kids in a nuclear family in a twice-mortgaged new bungalow in a new cul-de-sac in a suburb during the Space Age. Not Swinging, Swooning is the story of the boyhood years of Stevan Eldred-Grigg, told by himself. A story about a boy’s dreams, dreads, hopes, fears and adventures. A story about elbowing and being elbowed by five brothers, three sisters, Seven Sisters, many aunts, uncles, cousins, neighbours, friends, teachers, foes, heroes. A story about pop songs the boy thought were groovy. And about yarns spelled by the olds. Along with other tales he was told, or told himself, about being a boy – being in a suburb – and about becoming, or trying to become, a young man in the mod optimistic hi-gloss world of the sixties of last century.

Format: Paperback
Pages: 254
Imprint: Small New Zealand Publisher
Publication date: 28/02/2024