I keep coming back to the light of Brisbane. If you are born into it, this palette of gentle pinks and oranges at dawn and dusk, the blast white of midday in summer, the lemon luminescence of mid-morning and mid-afternoon, you keep it with you, and measure all other light by it. If you live away from it, then step back into it, it is the first thing that tells you you're home.

In this book, the third in a series on Australian cities in which leading Australian authors write about their home city, novelist and journalist Matthew Condon rediscovers the city of his childhood, Brisbane. Having returned there after many years, Condon takes the reader on a unique and personal journey through contemporary Brisbane, unearthing its history — sometimes literally — and painting a portrait of the contemporary transformation of the city.