No More Boats

No More Boats is a novel by the Australian writer Felicity Castagna, first published in 2017 and issued in the United States by Europa Editions in 2019. It was a finalist for the Miles Franklin Literary Award, and it sets one family's unravelling against a national argument about who is allowed to arrive.

Antonio is an Italian immigrant who has spent his working life in Sydney's western suburbs. An accident at work forces him into early retirement, and the loss of the job that organised his days leaves him at home with too much time and a growing sense of injury. His wife Rose has a history of her own that the marriage has never quite absorbed, and their two children, Nico and Claire, are each drifting away from the lives their parents expected for them.

Around them the city is in the middle of the Tampa affair, in which more than four hundred refugees were left stranded at sea while the government refused them entry. That crisis reaches into the family's own mythology about migration and belonging, and the novel follows the collision between what Antonio believes he earned by arriving and what the country now says about the people arriving after him. Castagna writes about western Sydney, the precariousness of the working poor and a property market that pushes them further out.