From Telegraph: Bondi beach, the Burma railway, Jewish humour, a boy from a broken home… Put the ingredients in a mixer, give them a good shake and you have a literary cocktail of rare originality. It is not hard to see why Mark Dapin’s stylish novel, set in Nineties Sydney, was such a critical success in Australia. The writing has real freshness and, apart from the odd hiccup, the story glides effortlessly from an intriguing start to a heart-warming resolution. David, who narrates, is a bright 13 year-old from Sydney whose parents have just split up. While his father gets his jollies with the “Woman in White”, and his mother experiences teething problems with the “Dark Man”, David is parked on his Jewish grandmother and her eccentric husband Jimmy, a war veteran haunted by his experiences in south-east Asia during the Second World War. It is an education in life that makes the classroom seem very dull. Jimmy and his grizzled Jewish cronies – Solomon the tailor, Myer the optician and Ernie the former war artist – are worth the cover price of the book in their own right, wisecracking their way non-stop through the day, as if to avoid dwelling on the horrors of the past. “Ernie is an aesthete,” Solomon explains to David. “That means he doesn’t believe in God.” “You’re thinking of an anaesthetist,” says Myer. Without emotional ballast, the friends’ badinage would quickly pall; but there is ballast aplenty in the harrowing stories of the war, which David coaxes out of his initially reluctant grandfather. The descriptions of life in Japanese captivity are beautifully done. Accounts of brutal beatings pull no punches, but there is also room for tenderness and humour. One of the strongest strands features Townsville Jack, a cussed so-and-so who is damned if he is going to let the war stop him organising frog-racing and other entertainments. He is a figure built on such a heroic scale that his downfall, when it comes, has tragic resonance. The spirit house of the title is an altar that Jimmy erects in his Bondi bungalow, with help from David, as his way of laying to rest the ghosts of the past. It does just that, bringing acceptance after years of troubled nights. As he does throughout the book, Dapin impresses with the understated authority of his storytelling.