Reviewed by Sarah Chandler, October 29, 2011 in “Your Weekend” Saturday magazine in The Dominion Post and The Press.

“Having a father you can love and who loves you is quite extraordinary. There is a great freedom that comes from it, a sense that one can get on with the business of fully being oneself, without the weight in the attic of what might or should have been.” So says Alan, the youngest of the novel’s three narrators, near the novel’s conclusion. Told through the voices of Hector, Doug and Alan, Coast explores the generational conflicts and connections that bind and divide three fathers and sons, as they navigate different paths to becoming ”fully themselves” while trying to make some kind of peace with each other. Young seems interested in tracing the trajectories of how we lose and find the permanent people in our lives; early in the novel he has Alan reflect “all these attempts at finding the ocean’s blue had nothing to do with fish – all this time I had been fishing for my father.” Coast spans the globe from the Scottish lowlands (where immigrant Scot Hector hails from) to his son Doug’s wartime adventures in New Caledonia, to the Whanganui - Rangitikei region to which all three characters are linked. However, Young’s real talent seems to be in his descriptions of a Kiwi social landscape, with its pikelets and whitebait fritters, dads teaching sons how to box, Sunday drives in the Ford Prefect and fort building. Aside from having a keen grasp of what could be called a common Pakeha history, Young shows a real facility for the kiwi male vernacular resulting in warm, convincing and down-to-earth characters. He has said his father Philip was essential both “informally and consciously” to the novel. Doug’s wartime adventures are at least partly based on his father’s memories. The three male narratives run fairly seamlessly, with the possible exception of the slightly anomalous dialogue between Alan and an old family friend Davie McKinnon. Coast is Young’s first novel, but I think it goes a way toward achieving some kind of social history of Pakeha. If at times the everyday lives of Hector, Doug and Alan don’t seem all that remarkable, there remains an honesty and force in the telling that leaves a Kiwi reader quite satisfied."

"For a long time David Young has been one of the clearest and most respected writers on New Zealand ecology, a champion for what its people hold in trust. He now brings a novelist's eye and voice to his story of pakeha settlement, plaiting his Scottish migrants into the weave of a 'new' land, and their engagement with what was already here. This is the story not of 'man alone' but of 'men together', for better or worse; of a country inherited and a country transformed. If you ask what it might mean to become a New Zealander, 'Coast' and its generations will take you a long way towards an answer." Vincent O'Sullivan

David Young connects a lifelong fascination with memory, water and landscape in his latest work, a novel, Coast. David works as a professional writer in the field of history and the environment. A former journalist and Listener writer, he has published widely – in essays, articles documentaries and books.