Peter Goldsworthy's high-octane, fourteen-year-old narrator Robbie Burns has creative energy to burn - physical and mental, sexual and literary, constructive and destructive. Coming of age in a small town peopled with big characters, he finds his new teacher Miss Peach the most unforgettable of all - his memories of her will haunt him for the rest of his life. Everything I Knew is at once laugh-out-loud funny and cry-out-loud tragic - farcical, horrifying, confronting - and bursting with originality. It challenges our determination to believe in the innocence of childhood and adolescence, and yet again shows Peter Goldsworthy to be a master of shifting tone.