Christian White’s The Ledge is a thriller-mystery about revisiting the past and not liking what you find there.
Set in the fictional Victorian mountain town of West Haven, chapters alternate between the present and the past, carefully holding the tension between the two in terms of both storytelling and broader themes of nostalgia and growing up.
In the present day, surveyors have discovered partially decomposed human remains in remote bushland near West Haven. A group of old friends who have been out of contact for years are pulled out of their adult lives and returned to what happened when they were teenagers. This includes our narrator, who returns to his hometown to find out if the body is who he thinks it is.
In 1999, the group as teenagers live through dark and terrible events in West Haven. This is told by the narrator through diary entries recounting the events that changed all their lives. But how involved were they in what happened that fateful, scorching summer? And does what we remember, really hold true to what actually happened?
This is a story of childhood ending, of friendships that mean the world, and the subsequent adulthood when you haven’t seen each other for decades. It’s about secrets and lies, innocence and growing up, small towns and remote spaces that we cannot escape and come to define us in strange and unexpected ways.
White keeps the reader on a knife-edge through the whole book, ending chapters with cliffhangers and explosive revelations, but never leaving you frustrated for long.
This book is perfect for fans of mysteries and thrillers, particularly those set in rural Australia.
This review was first published on AU Review.
