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Intro
Twelve-year-old Eli’s older brother, August, doesn’t speak. Instead, he writes words in the air with his finger. One afternoon, while the boys’ babysitter, convicted killer Slim Halliday, is teaching Eli to drive, August writes a phrase in the air that will haunt Eli: “your end is a dead blue wren.” August’s other odd habit is filling the street with water so he can look at the moon’s reflection in the water; he and Eli call the puddles “moon pools.” Eli adores Slim and the stories Slim tells about his criminal exploits, how he survived his years in prison, and his two successful escapes from prison.
Eli and August have recently discovered that Mum and her boyfriend, Lyle, have started selling heroin. One afternoon, August shows Eli a secret room in Lyle’s house that he found. It’s accessed through a hole in a built-in wardrobe. In the room is a red telephone, and when it rings, August and Eli answer it. A mysterious man is on the line.
One night, Eli sees a firework go off and sneakily follows Lyle when he sets off after the firework. Lyle heads for “Back Off” Bich Dang’s house. Bich’s son, Darren, is a classmate of Eli’s, and he finds Eli lurking in the yard. Darren likes Eli because he didn’t get him in trouble at school once when he had the opportunity to, so Darren leads Eli inside to meet his mother. There, Bich Dang tells Eli that Lyle is dealing drugs for him.
Several weeks later, the family heads to Bich Dang’s restaurant to celebrate Lyle’s drug boss, Tytus Broz’s, 80th birthday. Eli is afraid of Tytus—he manufactures prosthetic limbs and is generally disturbing. Eli lays eyes on Tytus’s evil henchman, Iwan Krol, for the first time, and Darren tells Eli that Iwan runs a llama farm by day, and that by night he murders and chops up people who cross Tytus. After the dinner, Eli begs Lyle to let him help sell drugs. Lyle initially refuses. But when Mum joins a school committee that meets on Saturdays, Lyle and his best friend, Teddy, begin taking Eli and August with them on their drug runs.
In the middle of dinner one evening, Tytus Broz and Iwan Krol burst into Lyle’s house. Before they drag Lyle away, Lyle writes something in the air to August. Iwan knocks Mum unconscious and then holds a knife to Eli’s pointer finger, his lucky finger. When August won’t tell Tytus Broz what Lyle wrote and instead says, “your end is a dead blue wren,” Iwan cuts Eli’s finger off.
While Eli is in the hospital, he learns from Slim that Mum has been incarcerated, and that he and August are going to go live with Dad. Lyle has also disappeared. Distraught, Eli escapes the hospital, goes to Lyle’s house, and answers the red phone when it rings. The man on the phone tells Eli that Mum isn’t going to live past Christmas. Eli then goes to the offices of a local newspaper where a reporter named Caitlyn Spies works. August has been writing her name in the air for no apparent reason, and Eli immediately falls in love with her. He runs away, though, before he can tell her about Tytus Broz.
The first several weeks of living with Dad are eventful. Dad spends his nights drinking and vomiting and his days reading. Eli speaks often to the guidance counselor, Mrs. Birkbeck. She tries to talk to Eli about trauma, and she asks Eli to describe for her what’s going on in a painting August did in art class of a car on the bottom of the ocean; Eli and August are in the backseat and Dad is driving. It is, apparently, a depiction of the moon pool and of Eli’s recurring dream. Finally, Mrs. Birkbeck comes to speak to Dad. She insists the dream isn’t a dream—it’s a memory. Dad admits that just before Mum left him, he took the boys camping and had a panic attack while driving. He lost control of the car and it went into a farmer’s dam, and it’s a miracle the boys survived. Hearing this conversation is transformative for Eli. He begins to reject August’s insistence that they died in the dam and came back to life, and he doesn’t think there’s anyone on the other end of the red phone. August insists the man on the phone is an older version of him. But August also tells Eli what Lyle’s last words to him were: where Lyle’s heroin stash was. The heroin is now hidden in Dad’s backyard.
As Christmas approaches, Eli asks Slim for help: he has to break into Boggo Road women’s prison and see Mum. Slim gives Eli a contact and, on Christmas Day, a man named George smuggles Eli into the prison in a watermelon crate. Eli is able to briefly see Mum, and he nearly escapes the prison the same way that Slim did decades ago. The guards take Eli home without getting him in trouble when they catch him.
Slim dies six months later. Soon after, Dad learns that Mum is getting out of prison early. Eli decides he and August must get jobs so that when Mum gets out, they can get her a nice place to live. The obvious choice for Eli is to sell Lyle’s heroin stash back to the Dangs. Darren purchases the heroin for $50,000 and shares that Teddy was the one who told Tytus about Lyle’s side dealing.
When Eli and August go visit Mum just after her release, they’re excited to tell her about their money—but Mum says she’s moving in with Teddy. Eli is enraged. Grudgingly, Eli and August agree to spend a week with Mum and Teddy. On the fourth night, Eli asks Teddy why he sold Lyle to Tytus. The next night, when he’s high and drunk, Teddy drags Mum outside by her hair and shoves her face into his dogs’ food bowl. Eli, August, and Mum spend the night at a halfway house. In the morning, Eli offers to buy Mum a place with Lyle’s heroin money. But Mum insists she’s going back to Teddy. While Eli is drinking away his sorrows the following night, August gives the remaining $49,500 to the family of a classmate with muscular dystrophy.
From Mum, Eli learns that The Courier-Mail—the paper he’s wanted to work for since he was little—offers internships. Finally, he works up the courage to go there and ask for a job. The boss, Brian Robertson, laughs at Eli, but Eli runs into Caitlyn Spies again. She’s even more alluring now that she’s the lead crime reporter.
One morning, Mum calls: she’s leaving Teddy and has nowhere to go. Dad grudgingly agrees that she can stay at his house. But hours after she arrives, Teddy and his cronies show up—as well as a mysterious man in a suit. The man, who turns out to be Alex Bermudez, Eli’s childhood pen pal and the leader of a prominent motorcycle gang, punches Teddy and tells him to leave Mum alone. Then he gives Eli a Dictaphone and sits for a four-hour interview to help Eli break into journalism. Eli sends the resulting story to Brian, who thinks Eli’s writing is ridiculous because Eli focuses on describing small details instead of just getting the story down. But he gives Eli a job anyway.
With Alex’s help, August starts a charity organization. For this, August is notified that he’s going to receive an award at a Queensland Day celebration. At work at The Courier-Mail, Eli gets his first real assignment—to write about recipients of the Queensland Day awards—at the same time as the office is in an uproar over the fact that the Penns, a family of supposed drug dealers, have gone missing. Eli suspects that Tytus Broz is involved. He’s certain of it when he sees a crime reporter’s notes and notices that the police found llama hair at the family’s home, a sure sign that Iwan Krol took the family. He tells Caitlyn to look into Iwan Krol.
On the day of the awards ceremony, Eli is supposed to interview Tytus Broz, who’s receiving an award for his prosthetics work. Caitlyn drives Eli to the interview and on the way, Eli tells her about how he lost his finger and his suspicions about the Penn family’s disappearance.
Caitlyn poses as Eli’s photographer for the interview. During the interview, a bird hits Tytus Broz’s window and dies—it’s a blue wren. But when Eli picks the bird up, it comes back to life again and flies to land on a bunker in the backyard. Eli and Caitlyn sneak back onto Tytus’s property later, after he’s left for the awards ceremony, and they break into the bunker with an axe. In it, they find a gruesome laboratory of preserved body parts. Eli discovers his finger in a specimen jar and Lyle’s preserved head; he packages both up to take with him. They also find the Penns’ son Bevan, alive and holding a red telephone out to Eli. The man on the phone warns Eli that Iwan is coming. Caitlyn blinds Iwan with the camera flash, while Eli cuts his foot off with the axe. Caitlyn, Eli, and Bevan escape and drive to the award ceremony in Brisbane.
Caitlyn stays outside with Bevan while Eli goes inside with Lyle’s head in a bag. Once August has received his award, Eli slips backstage. He and August replace a model of a prosthetic hand that Tytus plans to show onstage with Lyle’s head, and then they hurry Mum and Dad out of the auditorium. Caitlyn joins the family in the lobby as Tytus takes the stage and unwittingly reveals Lyle’s head. Police arrest Tytus, and Eli is thrilled.
Things seem fine—until Iwan appears and stabs Eli in the belly. Nobody at the awards ceremony really notices, and Eli flees by climbing to the top of the clock tower. Iwan catches up to Eli just as the police arrive on the scene. As the clock strikes nine, Eli smashes the jar with his finger in it over Iwan’s head and passes out. He dreams that he’s in prison with Slim, and Slim ushers him over the prison wall to a beach. Caitlyn is on the beach, and beyond the beach is the entire universe.
Six weeks later, Eli and Caitlyn visit Lyle’s old house; they’re working together on a five-part feature on Tytus Broz’s downfall. They enter the underground room, and the red telephone rings. As Eli moves to answer it, Caitlyn tells him not to and kisses him. When he kisses her back, the phone stops ringing.
