This is the story of becoming heroic in a culture which does not see heroism in the shape of a girl.
At the age of twenty, after a traumatic sexual assault trial, writer Kathryn Heyman ran away from her life and became a deckhand on a fishing trawler in the Timor Sea.
The life she left behind was beyond broken. Coming from a family of poverty and violence, she had no real role models, no example of how to create a decent life, how to have hope, how to have expectations. But she was a reader. She understood story, and the power of naming. This was her salvation.
After one wild season on board the Ocean Thief, the only girl among tough working men, facing storms, treachery, and harder physical labour than she had ever known, Heyman was transformed, able to face the abuses that she thought had broken her, able to see 'all that she had been blind to, simply to survive'.
A reflection on the wider stories of class, and of growing up female with all its risks and rewards, a road map of recovery and transformation: Fury is a memoir of courage and determination, of fighting back and demanding to be seen.
