Charlie and Whisky are identical twin brothers, whose dimly remembered bond from childhood has been undone by the competitiveness of adolescence and a decade of adult estrangement. According to Charlie, first-born Whisky always had the upper hand in everything: girls, sport, coolness. But when, in their early thirties, Whisky is left comatose by a freak accident, Charlie is hurled back into a contemplation of their past, as he tries to discover what went wrong with their relationship, and realises that he may be the culprit. He hasn’t spoken to his brother in years; will he ever speak to him again?

In its exploration of the complexity of Australian fraternity and the damage wrought on an entire family by one horrible event, Whisky Charlie Foxtrot is reminiscent of Peter Rose’s Rose Boys (2001). It is rare to encounter fiction that will appeal to adults and Young Adults alike that  so intelligently explores the downright messiness of family relationships through adult characters; rarer still to find an author who writes of traumatic injury and the looming shadow of death with such verve and sensitivity. Smith’s tightly controlled narrative, structured around the NATO phonetic alphabet, does all this and more, gradually revealing a complex yet believable network of family secrets and lies that explains but doesn’t quite justify Charlie’s decision to have renounced his twin. The author cleverly shifts our allegiances from the affable but hapless Charlie to the seemingly vacuous but generous-hearted Whisky without our even noticing, creating in the former one of the most flawed but relatable protagonists in recent memory.