Lou Spanner has spent forty years as a Sydney sports journalist, chasing deadlines and back-page exclusives. Now the game is changing around him - younger editors, shrinking budgets, effectiveness measured by 'clicks', and a redundancy lunch he can see coming a mile off.

When Spanner kills a fox on his pre-dawn drive through Long Gully, the encounter draws him into the orbit of Albert Moss, a fierce and solitary old man who guards a hidden fox colony on Sydney's North Shore. It also leads him to a chaotic under-nine rugby team at a Jesuit school - a squad of castoffs nobody wanted - and to the mystery of a carmine-red pigeon glimpsed above the Harbour Bridge, tied to a tragedy decades old.

Funny, elegiac and deeply humane, The Castoffs is a novel about what gets discarded, and what endures when no one is watching. Set against the sandstone canyons and bush-fringed suburbs of Sydney, it is a story about loyalty, ageing and the unexpected places where purpose is found.