Jamaica

It's no fun being male and forty: the days of kids-free, carefree, relationships are over, there's pressure to earn the money to pay for the inflated lifestyle bred by the success so eagerly striven for, and it takes much more work to keep in shape.

In the face of such an existential disaster, what's a group of long-time Aussie pals to do except fly out to Jamaica to take part in an endurance swimming competition across one of the most dangerous stretches of water off the coast. What they don't realise is that the strong current and sharks will turn out to be the least of their worries.

Knox's whirlwind novel is a forensic dissection of outwardly successful lives going catastrophically astray. The five guys - Hut, Nayce, Pong, Book and Blackman (what great nicknames) - and Janey, the lone woman, have known each other for a long time. They all, to some degree, exhibit signs of arrested development: eternally childlike Hut, sex-obsessed Pong and his right-hand-Blackman, and bitter Nayce, carrying an enormous chip around on his shoulder. Even Janey's effervescent I'm-so-happy-being-single carapace seems just that - a shell to protect her from deeper emotion.

An air of desperate joviality pervades proceedings from the moment the team members board their flight to the evening after the competition. While Hut whoops ridiculous clarion calls (' "What's not to love?" Hut repeated. He had a penchant for repeating punchlines over and over, until the last droplets of laughter had been squeezed out'), Pongrass is busy repeating stories of his sexual conquests or looking for opportunities to create new ones.

While Knox ably conveys the horror of these unhappy people on the rampage in a country they have no interest in discovering more about - or respecting - it is friendship that he is most interested in exploring, and here he hits the nail on the head.

Ask any 25-year-old whether they think they will still be in touch with their 195 Facebook friends in 15 years' time and the answer will probably be 'yes'. Ask any 40-year-old how many of their friends from 15 years ago they are still in touch with, and they'll probably say 'hardly any' (if they've got any sense).  This is a secret of life that is stumbled upon as one gets older. As Knox writes:

'Old friends were a break from the performance, the tap-dancing in front of machine guns, of corporate life. Yet, like living in a village, old friends confined you inside your past; they wouldn't let you change; they mocked your efforts at reinvention. Whatever you did, your oldest friends knew you better.'

This perfectly natural fact of life has eluded Hut and his mates (or they have chosen to ignore it). Stretched to breaking point under the pressure of personal crises, the swim, and Jamaica itself, the close-knit friendships (if they were ever even that) begin to unravel. Spectacularly.