White Foam (Paperback or Softback)

Shortlisted for Hachette Publishing's Richell Prize

After a suspension from his university job, twenty-eight-year-old Marc leaves Canada for the Australian coast, hoping six weeks beside the ocean will quiet the dissatisfaction that has followed him for years. Instead, he witnesses a freak wave claim the lives of two young people.

What begins as an accident quickly unsettles the small town of Mooringa. As grief and suspicion spreads through the community, long-standing resentments and racial tensions rise to the surface. Though no one accuses Marc directly, he becomes increasingly entangled in the lives of the families left behind-and in the question he cannot escape:
could he have done more?

As guilt gives way to obsession, Marc's careful emotional distance begins to fracture. The town people demand certainty where none exists, while Marc discovers that refusing to act is itself a choice.

Set against the beauty and violence of the Australian coastline, White Foam is a literary suspense and coming of age novel exploring responsibility, belonging and the uneasy feeling between innocence and complicity.

Perfect for readers of Tim Winton, Ian McEwan, Christos Tsiolkas, Richard Flanagan, Albert Camus, J.M. Coetzee and Michel Houellebecq, White Foam explores guilt, belonging, alienation, masculinity, shame, anger, and the moral cost of remaining a witness. It is a novel about forgiveness and what we owe each other after tragedy, and the price of avoiding ourselves. The past will find us, no matter how far we run or how well we hide.


"Fiercely complex, utterly compelling and ideologically switched-on, White Foam is that rare gem of a novel: incisive socio-cultural analysis dressed up as a page-turner.

The novel exposes how male disenfranchisement is a product of the poly crisis of white-supremacist capitalism, neoliberalism, patriarchy and masculinity.”

– Tim Loveday
Author of your father was a bastard


“Yannick Thoraval takes us inside the mind of a young person grappling with how to be a man in a world where masculinity is deeply, darkly contested. Suspenseful, thought-provoking, and viscerally involving.”

– Sian Prior
Author of Shy: a memoir

“With exquisite prose, literary sophistication and universal relatability, Yannick Thoraval illuminates the loneliness, isolation and anger that can shape men's lives. Both a compelling novel and a work of genuine social insight, White Foam reminds us that these struggles touch not only strangers but also our fathers, brothers, sons and neighbours, making it an urgent and important read for our times.'

– Dr Rachel Matthews
Author of Never Look Desperate

Yannick Thoraval is an award-winning writer and creative writing teacher.His fiction blends literary realism with genre fiction, and tends to focus on the relationship dynamics between characters. He has published three novels.His debut novel, The Current, a literary climate fiction, was commended in the Victorian Premier's Literary Award for an Unpublished Manuscript.His second novel, The Marriage Gap Year, is a second-chance romantic dramedy, was nominated for the Romance Writers of Australia Ruby Award for Book of the Year.Thoraval's third novel, White Foam, was shortlisted for Hachette Publishing's Richell Prize, highly commended for the Jim Hamilton Award and won third place for the Spineless Wonders Novella Prize. As a writer, I like telling stories about relationships, not just romantic ones, but also exploring people's relationships with their family, friends, their communities and their environment. I hold a master's degree in history, a PhD in creative writing, and I teach fiction, creative nonfiction, and communications at RMIT University in Melbourne, Australia.I also work as a writing mentor, ghostwriter, speechwriter, and creative coach for my private clients.My nonfiction work has been published in national publications such as The Australian Financial Review, The Big Issue, The Australian, and The Conversation. I have also won the New Millennium International Writing Prize for nonfiction.