Jock Serong Books in Order

If you want crime rooted in law: Quota
If you like dark family drama and sport: The Rules of Backyard Cricket
If you want a political thriller at sea: On the Java Ridge
If you want the historical novels first: Preservation → The Burning Island → The Settlement
If you want something stranger and more playful: Cherrywood

Jock Serong grew up in Melbourne's suburbs, and a lot of his work still carries that mix of city edge and coastal pull. He is an Australian novelist, a former lawyer, and a writer who stays very close to place. These days he divides his time between Port Fairy on Victoria's far west coast and Flinders Island in Bass Strait.

Before novels took over, Serong studied law at the University of Melbourne and also majored in archaeology. As a student and young lawyer he volunteered with the Victorian Aboriginal Legal Service during the Bringing Them Home inquiry, spent time in the Western Desert helping build a native title claim with the Martu people, and later worked with asylum seekers when detention centres were still onshore.

His working life was not neat or linear. He has written about driving an old panel van around the country, sorting frozen prawns in Carnarvon, changing lightbulbs in Darwin Casino, then ending up on Victoria's west coast before returning to the law as a criminal barrister.

He had plenty to store away.

The turn toward writing came after he moved back to the coast with a young family. He began publishing pieces in Surfing World and elsewhere, then pushed beyond surf writing into stories about people, landscape, First Australians, mental health, and the small strange dramas that make a place feel alive. He also co-edited Great Ocean Quarterly, which helped shape his life as an editor as well as a novelist.

His debut novel, Quota, introduced readers to Charlie Jardim, a lawyer trying to recover from a public collapse while working a murder case in a tight-lipped coastal town. It won the Ned Kelly Award for Best First Crime Novel. The Rules of Backyard Cricket followed with something darker and sadder under the sports surface, tracing the rivalry between two brothers into adulthood. Readers who like Serong often talk about the same things: pressure, moral compromise, sharp dialogue, and a strong feel for the sea and the weather.

Then he widened the frame. On the Java Ridge sets a surf charter, an asylum-seeker boat, and Australian politics on a collision course, and it brought him both the Colin Roderick Award and the Staunch Prize in the UK. After that came Preservation, The Burning Island, and The Settlement, a run of historical novels set around Bass Strait and colonial Australia. Those books pull shipwreck, survival, frontier violence, and uneasy reckonings into the same current, without losing the pace that first brought crime readers to his work.

Place matters in his books.

So does power. His novels keep circling law, history, masculinity, community, and the damage people do when institutions tell them they are entitled to it. Even when the setting shifts from a suburban cricket pitch to a convict-era shoreline or a strange Fitzroy pub in Cherrywood, he stays interested in what people owe each other, and in how landscapes hold memory.

That mix is what makes Serong easy to follow across genres. One book may read like noir, another like a sea thriller, another like historical fiction with a hard moral edge. The common thread is his eye for tension, his interest in overlooked histories, and his sense that Australia is never just background scenery. It is part of the argument.

He still lives close to the coast, and that feels right. So much of his fiction moves with tides, wind, boats, reefs, islands, and weather. Even when his characters are far from the water, you can usually feel it somewhere nearby.