Off the Record

A Novel

I have knocked on flyscreens and said to mothers of kidnapped toddlers, ‘Don’t you feel guilty for leaving your child in the front yard alone?’ I have shamed them to tears for the photographer. I have gatecrashed funerals, linked innocent corpses to local crime syndicates. Or feigned empathy to the grief-stricken to make copy from their hard-luck stories. I enjoyed the kudos of my name beneath headlines on front pages and became used to the heartlessness as if blank inside. I was doing it for my family—it was worth the cruelty.

That line of work gives your eyes a plastic appearance. I’ve noticed it in the mirror, a dead glitter.

Callum Smith—Wordsmith, Words for short—is a newspaper journalist of the old school. He knows how to write a story that sings, knows all the tricks of the tabloid trade. And he likes to drink with his colleagues, sometimes to flirt dangerously with young women.

When his marriage blows up after a night of drinking goes way too far, Words is forced to leave the family home. Desperate to impress his estranged wife and feckless teenage son, he quits his job, taking a pay cut to work with a new online publication covering local crime. There the plum role of editor will soon be his, he reasons.

To Words, ‘Honesty is a thief—it steals your life.’ Better to do whatever it takes to get back in someone’s good books. And that is what he sets out to do, in a series of ever more calamitous, destructive and amoral adventures.

Will the irredeemable Words win back his family? Or is comeuppance around the corner?

A satirical novel by Miles Franklin Literary Award shortlisted author Craig Sherborne, Off the Record stylishly skewers tabloid journalism and male vanity.

Craig Sherborne’s memoir Hoi Polloi (2005) was shortlisted for the Queensland Premier’s and Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards. The follow-up, Muck (2007), won the Queensland Premier’s Literary Award for Non-fiction. Craig’s first novel, The Amateur Science of Love (2011), won the Melbourne Prize for Literature’s Best Writing Award, and was shortlisted for a Victorian Premier’s Literary Award and a NSW Premier’s Literary Award. His second novel, Tree Palace (2014), was shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Award.

Craig has also written two volumes of poetry, Bullion (1995) and Necessary Evil (2005), and a verse drama, Look at Everything Twice for Me (1999). He lives outside Melbourne.

‘It’s pacy, sleek, muscled—a mesmerising portrait of how a creep of a guy (who can look very much like you or me) can weave a web in which he finds himself.’ Peter Craven, Australian

’Sharp, taut and sizzlingly mean, Off The Record paints a biting portrait of a hard-boiled hack you would not want on your back…It is an expertly crafted almost-satire, that, though billed as dark comedy, is a cautionary tale about the true cost of selling your professional and creative soul, and of unbridled vanity. Ruthlessly riveting.’ Herald Sun

‘Ambiguous, funny, and refreshingly unwise.’ Monthly

‘This novel is a demonstration of Sherborne’s virtuosity as a writer.’ Australian Book Review

‘Monstrous yet moving.’ New Zealand Herald

‘A satirical romp through the seedy undergrowth of a headline hunter.’ North & South

‘Certain of his skewed world view, there’s a perverse delight in watching Words work, and an even greater one in watching him unravel…A smug satire of old school journalism and male pride.’ AU Review

‘Reading this novel is like watching a rabbit caught in the headlights of a vehicle. There’s an awful fascination, almost a voyeuristic delight, in watching a man dig himself deeper into a hole of amoral sensationalism.’ Good Reading